This volume is the first to address the culture of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a historical entity, but also to trace the afterlife of East Germany in the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. An international team of outstanding scholars offers essential and thought-provoking essays, combining a chronological and genre-based overview from the beginning of the GDR in 1949 to the unification in 1990 and beyond, with in-depth analysis of individual works. A final chapter traces the resonance of the GDR in the years since its demise and analyses the fascination it engenders. The volume provides a 'rereading' of East Germany and its legacy as a cultural phenomenon free from the prejudices that prevailed while it existed, offering English translations throughout, a guide to further reading and a chronology.

Often regarded as the greatest German poet of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 1926) remains one of the most influential figures of European modernism. In this Companion, leading scholars offer informative and thought-provoking essays on his life and social context, his correspondence, all his major collections of poetry including most famously the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, and his seminal novel of Modernist anxiety, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Rilke's critical contexts are explored in detail: his relationship with philosophy and the visual arts, his place within modernism and his relationship to European literature, and his reception in Europe and beyond. With its invaluable guide to further reading and a chronology of Rilke's life and work, this Companion will provide an accessible, engaging account of this extraordinary poet whose legacy looms so large today.

A book-length cycle of forty-nine poems written over the course of more than a decade that together serve as a lament for Durs Grünbein’s hometown, Dresden, which was destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945.  Porcelain is a book-length cycle of forty-nine poems written over the course of more than a decade that together serve as a lament for Durs Grünbein’s hometown, Dresden, which was destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945. The book is at once a history and “declaration of love� to the famed “Venice on the Elbe,� so catastrophically razed by British bombs; a musical fusion of eyewitness accounts, family memories, and stories, of monuments and relics; the story of the city’s destiny as seen through a prism of biographical enigmas, its intimate relation to the “white gold� porcelain that made its fortune and reflections on the power and limits of poetry. Musical, fractured, ironic, and elegiac, Porcelain is controversial, too, in setting itself against what Grünbein calls the “myth� of the Germans as innocent victims of a war crime. At the same time, it never loses sight of the horror deliberately visited on an unwitting civilian population, nor the devastation that looms so large in the German memory. Published for the first time in English, on the seventy-fifth year anniversary of the firebombing, this edition contains new images, notes, Grünbein’s own reflections, and an additional canto—an extraordinary act of poetic kintsugi for the fractured remains of Dresden’s memory.  

A dazzling selection of more than one hundred poems that trace the development of Durs Grünbein’s work over the past two decades. Born in Dresden in 1962, Durs Grünbein is the most significant and successful poet of his generation in Germany. Since 1988, when the then-twenty-five-year-old burst onto the scene with his poetry collection Grauzone morgens—a mordant reckoning with the East Germany he grew up in—Grünbein has published more than thirty books of poetry and prose, which have been translated into dozens of languages. In 2005 the volume Ashes for Breakfast introduced Grünbein to English-language readers for the first time by sampling poetry from his first four collections. Psyche Running picks up where that volume left off and offers a selection of poems from his nine subsequent collections, which shows how Grünbein has developed from his ironic take on the classical into an elegiac exploration of history through dream fragments and poems with a haunting existential unease.  

A book-length cycle of forty-nine poems written over the course of more than a decade that together serve as a lament for Durs Grünbein’s hometown, Dresden, which was destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945.  Porcelain is a book-length cycle of forty-nine poems written over the course of more than a decade that together serve as a lament for Durs Grünbein’s hometown, Dresden, which was destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945. The book is at once a history and “declaration of love� to the famed “Venice on the Elbe,� so catastrophically razed by British bombs; a musical fusion of eyewitness accounts, family memories, and stories, of monuments and relics; the story of the city’s destiny as seen through a prism of biographical enigmas, its intimate relation to the “white gold� porcelain that made its fortune and reflections on the power and limits of poetry. Musical, fractured, ironic, and elegiac, Porcelain is controversial, too, in setting itself against what Grünbein calls the “myth� of the Germans as innocent victims of a war crime. At the same time, it never loses sight of the horror deliberately visited on an unwitting civilian population, nor the devastation that looms so large in the German memory. Published for the first time in English, on the seventy-fifth year anniversary of the firebombing, this edition contains new images, notes, Grünbein’s own reflections, and an additional canto—an extraordinary act of poetic kintsugi for the fractured remains of Dresden’s memory.  

Marking Paul Celan's 100th birthday and the 50th anniversary of his death, this volume endeavours to answer the following question: why does Celan still matter today - more than ever perhaps? And why should he continue to matter tomorrow? In other words, the volume explores and assesses the enduring significance of Celan's life and oeuvre in and for the 21st century. Boasting cutting-edge research by international scholars together with original contributions by contemporary artists and writers, this book attests to, on the one hand, the extent to which large swathes of contemporary philosophy, poetics, literary scholarship, and aesthetics have been indebted to Celan's legacy and are simply unthinkable without it, and, on the other hand, to the malleability, adaptability, breadth and depth of Celan's poetics, which, like the music of The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, or Queen, is reborn and rediscovered with every new generation.

This volume is the first to address the culture of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a historical entity, but also to trace the afterlife of East Germany in the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. An international team of outstanding scholars offers essential and thought-provoking essays, combining a chronological and genre-based overview from the beginning of the GDR in 1949 to the unification in 1990 and beyond, with in-depth analysis of individual works. A final chapter traces the resonance of the GDR in the years since its demise and analyses the fascination it engenders. The volume provides a 'rereading' of East Germany and its legacy as a cultural phenomenon free from the prejudices that prevailed while it existed, offering English translations throughout, a guide to further reading and a chronology.

Now in paperback, a comic and moving collection of stories of grumpy old men who start to find unexpected connections with the world. The thirteen stories of Michael Kruger's The God behind the Window capture the poignancy and cynicism of late life through tales of misanthropic old men full of the mixture of wisdom and melancholy that so often accompanies old age. In Kruger's stories, world-weary characters seek-and only temporarily find-solace in nature and culture, rendering their search for a better life simultaneously comedic and heart wrenching. From a solitary hiker in the Swiss Alps to the book's eponymous shut-in, these aging malcontents are continually surprised by the unexpected interventions of a world that has come to seem predictable. Kruger captures this stage in life masterfully, contrasting the deeply personal emotions of affection, melancholy, and longing with an indifferent world. The resulting stories are lyrical, philosophical, and tender despite their cynicism.

Poetically written and originally given as lectures, this is a moving essay collection from Durs Grunbein. In his four Lord Weidenfeld Lectures held in Oxford in 2019, German poet Durs Grunbein dealt with a topic that has occupied his mind ever since he began to perceive his own position within the past of his nation, his linguistic community, and his family: How is it possible that history can determine the individual poetic imagination and segregate it into private niches? Shouldn't poetry look at the world with its own sovereign eyes instead? In the form of a collage or "photosynthesis," in image and text, Grunbein lets the fundamental opposition between poetic license and almost overwhelming bondage to history appear in an exemplary way. From the seeming trifle of a stamp with the portrait of Adolf Hitler, he moves through the phenomenon of the "Fuhrer's streets" and into the inferno of aerial warfare. In the end, Grunbein argues that we are faced with the powerlessness of writing and the realization, valid to this day, that comes from confronting history. As he muses, "There is something beyond literature that questions all writing."

A novel of two young friends growing up on divergent paths in the last days of Communist East Germany. What is it like to be young and broken in a country that is on the brink of collapse? This is what acclaimed poet and sound artist Ulrike Almut Sandig shows us in her debut novel, through the story of old friends Ruth and Viktor in the last days of Communist East Germany. The two central characters are inseparable since kindergarten, but they are forced to go their different ways to escape their difficult childhood: Ruth into music and the life of a professional musician; Viktor into violence and a neo-Nazi gang. Monsters Like Us is a story of families, a story of abuse, a story about the search for redemption and the ways it takes shape over generations. More than anything, it is about the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and who we want to be. Bold, brutal, and lyrical, this is a coming-of-age novel that charts the hidden violence of the world we live in today.

Often regarded as the greatest German poet of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 1926) remains one of the most influential figures of European modernism. In this Companion, leading scholars offer informative and thought-provoking essays on his life and social context, his correspondence, all his major collections of poetry including most famously the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, and his seminal novel of Modernist anxiety, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Rilke's critical contexts are explored in detail: his relationship with philosophy and the visual arts, his place within modernism and his relationship to European literature, and his reception in Europe and beyond. With its invaluable guide to further reading and a chronology of Rilke's life and work, this Companion will provide an accessible, engaging account of this extraordinary poet whose legacy looms so large today.

Michael Kruger is a major figure in modern German poetry, one of its great editors and leading practitioners. In 1993 Carcanet published Diderot's Cat, Michael Kruger's original Selected Poems, which drew on thirteen collections. This new edition, in German and English, incorporates portions of that book with selections from five later books, translated by Karen Leeder and Richard Dove. Introducing Diderot's Cat, Dove declared, 'If the recent German Zeitgeist could speak, it might sound a good deal like Michael Kruger.' For his American editor and publisher the poet Stanley Moss he is 'a self-made oracle of various cultures. His poetry - teaches us how to walk in the night - '

The poems of Ulrike Almut Sandig are at once simple and fantastic. This new collection finds her on her way to imaginary territories. Thick of It charts a journey through two hemispheres to "the center of the world" and navigates a "thicket" that is at once the world, the psyche, and language itself. The poems explore an urgently urban reality, but that reality is interwoven with references to nightmares, the Bible, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes--all overlaid with a finely tuned longing for a disappearing world. The old names are forgotten, identities fall away; things disappear from the kitchen; everything is sliding away. Powerful themes emerge, but always mapped onto the local, the fractured individual in "the thick of it" all. This is language at its most crafted and transformative, blisteringly contemporary, but with a kind of austerity, too. By turns comic, ironic, skeptical, nostalgic, these poems are also profoundly musical, exploiting multiple meanings and stretching syntax, so that the audience is constantly kept guessing, surprised by the next turn in the line.

Breviaries, books of standard religious readings for particular denominations, are a familiar genre with a long pedigree. But you've definitely never seen a breviary like this one. The Sex of the Angels is a playful, often ironic take on the breviary in the form of a collection of letters that begins by taking up early Christian cosmology and follows the Biblical mutations of the angel from Babylon to the present day. As it goes along, Raoul Schrott also weaves in a history which ranges from ancient Greek legends of the origin of light to the medieval darkness of the eclipse. But there is more going on here than meets the eye: the letters are addressed to an unnamed "other" and chart the course of an elusive affair. They are, we come to realize, a declaration of love--or, more accurately, of yearning--but also a far-reaching poetic essay which moves between etymological history, anthropological anecdote, philosophy, and disquisition on the nature of art. The text is supplemented by sumptuous illustrations by Arnold Mario Dall'O that chart the stories of the saints, and the result is a unique dialogue between literature and art: an extraordinary and rare book about love.

Ulrike Almut Sandig's second volume of poems to be translated into English is a journey through a world that is imaginary yet entirely recognizable. Precise observation of the concrete is mixed with playful humor, inspired musicality, and an anxious reckoning with undercurrents of violence in these poems from Ulrike Almut Sandig. Borrowing from the Brothers Grimm, the collection explores the darker side of their fairy tales as a backdrop for very contemporary concerns: Migration, war, the rise of the new right, ecological threat, information overload, and political apathy. At the same time, Sandig plays with the German meaning of the word "Grimm" rage. That emotion permeates the collection as a reaction to the darkness in the collective German consciousness. Yet the book is also animated by passionate, expansive empathy--and reminds us what it is to be human. Always inventive, Sandig teases us here with multiple versions of the self, and multiple voices all in search of the origins of poetry in hidden places: in the silence before language, in the wings, in the field of rapeseed deep in the snow.

A collection of vital, melancholic, elemental, and vibrantly contemporary poems. In the beginning, was the light, or was it the Lumières? In Ulrike Almut Sandig’s latest volume of poetry, it is only a leap from the creation of the world to the symphony of the Berlin metropolis. And there is a question holding out off the coast of Lampedusa: Can shining sheep be used as night storage for the dark hours, when we are overwhelmed with fears of God, of a gym teacher with a whistle, of mothers with eyes as black as coal? In devastating sequences, Sandig charts the reality of an abused child, victims of contemporary war, or a fourteenth-century Madonna. Full of humor, musicality, lightness, and rage, Shining Sheep is not just visual poetry—it has loops in your ear and filmic explosions of imagery for all your senses.

Brecht's activities in the GDR, the regime's marginalizing response and posthumous appropriation of his legacy, and creative responses in the GDR and after. The avant-garde writer and director Bertolt Brecht left the West for good in 1949, returning to East Berlin and founding the Berliner Ensemble. While he quickly became identified internationally as the cultural figurehead of the young socialist state, his relationship with the authorities was always complex, and he was increasingly marginalized by restrictive and authoritarian structures of power. It was only after his death that the regime sought to elevate him as a socialist classic - a shift that entailed the selective appropriation of his legacy and the development of authorized modes of interpretation and performance. Poets, theorists, dramatists, and directors soon reacted against what they saw as the stagnation of Brecht's critical impetus: they began to subject his work to his own treatment, using his texts as a source of material and taking his methods to more radical conclusions. EGYB 5 explores the multiple, contradictory impulses behind these broad paradigm shifts and behind Brecht's activities in the GDR. It investigates the tensions engendered by his co-option as a socialist classic, and the range of creative responses his works have inspired, both in the GDR itself and in reaction to its demise. Contributors: David Barnett, Laura Bradley, Joy Calico, Paula Hanssen, Patrick Harkin, Loren Kruger, Karen Leeder, Moray McGowan, Stephen Parker, David Robb, Erdmut Wizisla. Laura Bradley is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Edinburgh. Karen Leeder is Professor of Modern German Literature and a Fellow of New College, University of Oxford.

Ulrike Almut Sandig’s second volume of poems to be translated into English is a journey through a world that is imaginary yet entirely recognizable. Precise observation of the concrete is mixed with playful humor, inspired musicality, and an anxious reckoning with undercurrents of violence in these poems from Ulrike Almut Sandig. Borrowing from the Brothers Grimm, the collection explores the darker side of their fairy tales as a backdrop for very contemporary concerns: Migration, war, the rise of the new right, ecological threat, information overload, and political apathy. At the same time, Sandig plays with the German meaning of the word “Grimm�: rage. That emotion permeates the collection as a reaction to the darkness in the collective German consciousness. Yet the book is also animated by passionate, expansive empathy—and reminds us what it is to be human. Always inventive, Sandig teases us here with multiple versions of the self, and multiple voices all in search of the origins of poetry in hidden places: in the silence before language, in the wings, in the field of rapeseed deep in the snow.  

"With Brecht, Benn, Bobrowski and Celan, Peter Huchel is one of a handful of essential post-war poets in the German language. A precise observer of natural phenomena, Huchel is above all a realist whose metaphors take us deep into the social and historical landscape, into zones of devastation and despair, the zero-hour of isolation. His world is devoid of illusion or sentimentality; there is no redemption, at most an exactitude that is itself a confirmation of what is human and real. Lifted out of the schismatic currents of the Cold War era by Martyn Crucefix's supple and arrestingly sensual translations, Huchel surprises us as a fresh and startling voice for our own numbered days." --Iain Galbraith

This English edition of Munsterer's memoir (first published in German in 1963) has a substantial introduction and notes. Michael Morley, who interviewed Munsterer, gives a portrait of him in the preface, in which he explores his relationship with Brecht, and asesses the significance of the book for subsequent Brecht research. The Munsterer text is followed by introduced and annotated translated extracts from other early contemporary accounts of Brecht, taken from his brother Walter's memoir, Frisch and Obermeier's "Brecht in Augsburg", Munsterer's diaries, and the reminiscences of - among others - Arnolt Bronnen and Paula Banholzer.

A collection of essays offering a nuanced understanding of the complex question of identity in today's Germany. This collection of fifteen essays by scholars from the UK, the US, Germany, and Scandinavia revisits the question of German identity. Unlike previous books on this topic, however, the focus is not exclusively on national identityin the aftermath of Hitler. Instead, the concentration is upon the plurality of ethnic, sexual, political, geographical, and cultural identities in modern Germany, and on their often fragmentary nature as the country struggles with the challenges of unification and international developments such as globalization, multiculturalism, and postmodernism. The multifaceted nature of German identity demands a variety of approaches: thus the essays are interdisciplinary, drawing upon historical, sociological, and literary sources. They are organized with reference to three distinct sections: Berlin, Political Formations, and Difference; yet at the same time they illuminate one another across the volume, offering a nuanced understanding of the complex question of identity in today's Germany. Topics include the new self-understanding of the Berlin Republic, Berlin as a public showcase, the Berlin architecture debate,the Walser-Bubis debate, fictions of German history and the end of the GDR, the impact of the German student movement on the FRG, Prime Minister Biedenkopf and the myth of Saxon identity, women in post-1989 Germany, trains as symbols and the function of the foreign in post-1989 fiction, identity construction among Turks in Germany and Turkish self-representation in post-1989 fiction, the state of German literature today. Contributors: Frank Brunssen, Ulrike Zitzlsperger, Janet Stewart, Kathrin Schoedel, Karen Leeder, Ingo Cornils, Peter Thompson, Chris Szejnmann, Sabine Lang, Simon Ward, Roswitha Skare, Eva Kolinsky, Margaret Littler, Katharina Gerstenberger, and Stuart Parkes. Stuart Taberner is Lecturer in German, and Frank Finlay is Professor of German and Head of the Department of German, both at the University of Leeds, UK.

The Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for Summer 2018. The Austrian poet and novelist Evelyn Schlag, whose 2004 Selected Poems received the coveted Schlegel Tieck Prize, returns with All under One Roof. Once more, Karen Leeder’s brilliant translations render a selection of Schlag’s most recent poems into English. The book draws on two substantial German-language collections, Sprache von einem anderen Holz (2008) and verlangsamte raserei (2014). There is also a new essay by the author in which she discusses the sources, politics and strategies of her writing. Love remains a central theme for Schlag, but an associative inward journey with new diction, and new orthography, is underway. Rüdiger Görner in Die Presse responded to the vibrancy of what he called the `Sprachpulsate’ (pulses of language): `Evelyn Schlag’s poems have a kind of discreet presence; once spoken they have claimed their permanent place in the lyric cosmos.’ Leeder’s selection traces a uniquely Austrian imagination at the heart of contemporary European poetry.

Durs Grunbein is the most significant poet and essayist in German today. No other modern German poet has written from such an emphatically European and global perspective, and this volume seeks to present the poet and his work to the English-speaking world in all their significance and breadth. Written by a line-up of international scholars and critics, the volume offers highly readable and wide-ranging essays on Grunbein's substantial oeuvre, complemented by specially commissioned material and an interview with the poet. It covers the German and European traditions, and engages with Grunbein's works in the context of a number of relevant topics, such as 'memory', 'urban life', 'mortality', 'love', and 'presence'; it also probes Grunbein's sustained dialogue with the natural sciences and the visual arts.

A key critical work bringing relevance to Brecht's poetry in the 21st century Brecht is increasingly recognised as one of the most important lyric voices of the 20th century. Alongside Rilke he is honoured as Germany's greatest modern poet. Yet his poetry is relatively little known in the English speaking world. This title takes its cue from an allegorical poem about the artist's legacy and looks at how poets and translators might read Brecht today.The volume arises from a seminar held at Oxford University in 1998 to mark the centenary of Brecht's birth and includes seminal contributions from experts. It sheds new light on individual poems as well as giving an overview of Brecht's poetry from the earliest days to the GDR years. There are also Brecht poems in parallel translation as well as translations by major British poets such as Tom Paulin, Seamus Heaney, Jamie McKendrick, Michael Morley, Derek Mahon, and David Constantine.Contributors include: Ronald Speirs, Hans-Harald Muller, Tom Kindt, Robert Habeck, Hilda Brown, David Midgley, Elizabeth Boa, Anthony Phelan, David Constantine, Ray Ockenden, Erdmut Wizisla.