The German Genius

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    Celan’s best-known work, “Todesfuge” (Death Fugue), was written in the year war ended, when the full extent of the Holocaust was becoming known. The poem, which begins “Schwarze Milch der Frühe” (“Black milk of daybreak”) and climaxes with the terrible phrase “der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland” (“Death is a master from Germany”), is a commemoration of the death-camps, its title reflecting (and anticipating) the dangerous ambiguity that would come to afflict memory of the crime: a fugue is a piece of music, a work of art, but also a flight, an avoidance, a psychological illness, and (it can be) an escape. 36 Celan’s style gradually became terser—he called this “straightening,” Engführung . Later still, he argued that true poetry reflects a natural “tendency towards silence,” and this too may be understood as poetry after Auschwitz. Celan, who was Jewish, committed suicide in 1970.
    Not everyone shared this tendency toward silence. In his verteidigung der wölf ( defense of the wolves ; 1957), Hans Magnus Enzensberger became both the natural successor to Brecht (who had died the year before) and the leader of a school which adapted Brecht’s conviction that a poem should be an “object for use” ( Gebrauchsgegenstand ). Enzensberger’s work is characterized by anger and aggression and urges greater political awareness among his readers, the very opposite of the aim of Benn and Celan. 37
    A D EFORMED R EALITY
     
    On the other side of the Iron Curtain, inside the GDR, the early environment for poetry seemed encouraging once it had shaken free of its much-derided “tractor verses” (“Boy meets tractor” is how Adorno satirized it), and when J. R. Becher, a poet of no mean talent, was made first minister of culture in 1949. 38 But he was soon displaced and it was in any case to reckon without Brecht himself who lost little time producing a series of snapshots (“Der Rauch” [Smoke], “Der Radwechsel” [Changing the Wheel], and “Böser Morgen” [Bad Morning]), a succession of unpalatable truths about life in the East. After Brecht’s death in 1956, Günter Kunert did his best to fill the gap, taking aim at the bureaucracy and, in doing so, helping to provoke a younger generation of poets at what was by now the J. R. Becher Institute for Literature in Leipzig. 39 Volker Braun was (and is) the best of this school, his finest work juxtaposing the intense personal discomforts unique to the GDR alongside the avowed utopian assertions of the state. He was joined by Sarah Kirsch and Wolf Biermann. 40
    In theory at least, the East German bureaucracy encouraged these voices, especially so in Erik Honecker’s notorious “no taboos” speech delivered in 1971. But the inherent tension could not be disguised for long, and in 1976 Biermann was, as mentioned earlier, expelled. His expulsion was too much for many people, and Günter Kunert, Reiner Kunze, and Sarah Kirsch all followed him west. 41
    After that, the only way was up. The liberalization known as glasnost , in the 1980s, played a part, but so too did the new generation of poets “born into” socialism, who had very little expectation of the GDR as a form of utopia. For writers such as Heinz Czechowksi, Ernst Moritz Arndt, and Rainer Erb it was simply a deformed reality, and they plucked up the courage to say so. Wolfgang Emmerich went so far as to claim that “a major legacy” of the GDR would be its lyric poetry. This recalls Anna Akhmatova’s claim that the “lyrical wealth” of Russia could not be destroyed by the Stalinists.
    East and West German poets were in any case drawing closer together in the 1980s, both turning away from socialism (known in the GDR as Abscheid nehmen , or “taking leave of a disappearing world”) and both showing the traditional German anxiety about the relentless march of technology. Enzensberger stood out here too in his long narrative poem, “Der Untergang der Titanic” (The Sinking of the Titanic; 1978). Joachim Kaiser observed that in fact German literature had no need of reunification: “Its profound communality was never broken…only endangered.” 42
    Amid the explosion of verse that erupted during and after the euphoria of the Wende of 1989 (a turning point that Peter Schneider thought was “intellectually comparable” to 1945), Volker Braun’s “Nachruf” (Obituary) stood out as a paradigm of the 1990s, mourning the dead utopian dreams of the GDR but, more