German Poetry

New book

2007-11-29T13:26:00.000Z

New German Literature: Life Writing and Dialogues with the Arts

ed. by Frank Finlasy, Julian Preece and Ruth J. Owen (2007)

This is a collection of essays based on two conferences held in Leeds in recent years. Contributions focus on the variety and depth of the 'dialogue' between contemporary German literature and other art forms - in the sense of all types of cultural transfer across media - from literature to photography, film, painting, architecture, music, and back.

Poetikdozentur

2007-11-14T11:19:00.000Z

Kiel, 19.11.-22.11.2007
Im Sommersemester 1996 wurde am Institut für Neuere deutsche Literatur und Medien eine Poetikdozentur eingerichtet, die nach dem in Kiel geborenen Dichter Detlev von Liliencron benannt wurde. Als einzige ihrer Art in Deutschland ist diese Dozentur ausschließlich der Lyrik vorbehalten. Die bisherigen Dozenten waren: Doris Runge, Raoul Schrott, Dirk von Petersdorff, Thomas Rosenlöcher, Harald Hartung, Dagmar Leupold, Ilma Rakusa, Oskar Pastior, Ulrike Draesner, Michael Lentz.
Brigitte Oleschinski ist mit der Kieler Liliencron-Dozentur 2007 ausgezeichnet worden. Die in Berlin lebende Schriftstellerin ist seit ihrer ersten Lyriksammlung Mental Heat Control mit Gedichtbänden und Essays zu einer herausragenden Stimme in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartslyrik geworden.
Die Termine der Dozentur im Überblick:
Mo, 19.11., 20 Uhr, Literaturhaus;
Eröffnungslesung: Brigitte Oleschinski liest aus ihrem lyrischen Werk
Di, 20.11., 18 Uhr, Universität;
Poetikvorlesung von Brigitte Oleschinski: "Zur Zukunft der Poesie - und was sie, vielleicht, mit der zeitgenössischen Lyrik zu tun hat."
Do, 22.11., 20 Uhr, Literaturhaus;
Brigitte Oleschinski und Richard Kämmerlings im Gespräch über die Zukunft der Poesie und die zeitgenössische Lyrik; Moderation: Steffen Martus
Auskunft erteilt: lkorten@ndl-medien.uni-kiel.de

Podcasting Goethe

2007-10-31T11:15:00.000Z

A podcasting project is being developed at the University of Warwick, which includes texts and recorded readings of Goethe's poetry.

Film Review: Sehnsucht

2007-08-09T11:54:00.000+01:00

This 2006 film, by Valeska Griesbach, evokes a provincial backwater where the pace of life is stultifying. The main protagonist goes through the motions creating literal noise and sparks as he does his metalwork, but everything else within and without is still and silent. This man has no interior vitality; he says almost nothing. A jaunt with the local volunteer firefighters shows us the limited sphere he will inhabit, and the cliches he will mouthe, for the rest of his life.
At this point, he wakes up in bed with Rose, who rather than being an exciting alternative to his sweet, simple wife, replicates her. The man does not reflect on his relationships, nor articulate any emotion. Indeed, immediately before the encounter with Rose, we see him drunkenly gyrating to millionnaire Robbie Williams's track with the repeated line 'I just want to feel...'. This is one of the most striking scenes in the film, funny and subversive. His wife, likewise, does not seem to have her own words, but tries out phrases inherited from third-rate romantic fiction. Despite his disconnection and alienation, the man is compelled to go to Rose and sustain the infidelity which confuses him. Just before he puts a shotgun to his heart, he holds a rabbit in his arms, just as he has held both the women. At the moment where we find this ridiculous, his body recoils from the gunshot.
In the masterful final scene of the film, pre-pubescent children retell the story as gossip; some say the man survived and went back to the first woman, some that he survived and went back to the second one. It doesn't matter which. The longing of the film's title is not about a man being in love with two women, although it refers to that idea. Rather, this is one of several cherished myths - of a rural utopia, of a passionate affair, of a life-changing decision - which are revisted and subverted through figures who are ordinarily numb, and far removed from the self-dramatizing, overly articulate heroes and heroines of glossy pulp film-making.

New Poetry

2007-07-09T10:52:00.000+01:00

Bella triste 17: Sonderausgabe zur deutschsprachigen Gegenwartslyrik: Gedichte, Szenen, Meinungen

This special issue contains poems and poetological reflections by 34 poets writing in German today. It is a wonderful volume of new work (and some new names). There are lines that one memorises, such as Monika Rinck’s ‘du kannst deinen kopf benutzen als eine dritte hand’, and memorable poems such as Uljana Wolf’s two ‘aufwachraum’ poems, as well as statements of poetics, poets’ comments on their colleagues’ poems, and thoughts on the German poetry scene. It’s all good! Buy it whilst it’s available – you’d be hard pressed to put 8 euros to better use!

Die Macht der Sprache

2007-06-18T14:40:00.000+01:00

Das Festival "Die Macht der Sprache" feierte das Deutsche und die kulturelle Vielfalt
Drei Tage, über 60 Veranstaltungen. Das Festival beendete ein zweijähriges internationales Programm, das selbst ein Plädoyer für die Pflege der Mehrsprachigkeit war. Es mündete in ein Manifest, das betonte, wie wichtig die Vielfalt der Sprachen für den Reichtum der Welt und die Bewahrung der jeweiligen Tonart einer Kultur sei. Autoren diskutierten über ihre "literarische Patchwork-Identität". Der Gewinn sprachlicher Vielfalt für die Bildung wurde betont.
Wie geht es nun dem Deutschen? Wird es seinen Platz in der Vielfalt behaupten können? Ein Festivalkreis diskutierte darüber, wie man das Deutsche als Wissenschaftssprache stärken könne, bevor es ganz vom Englischen verdrängt werde. Ziel ist eine Plattform der großen Wissenschaftsorganisationen, um zu erreichen, dass auch bei internationalen Tagungen wieder mehrsprachig diskutiert werde.

Arts disciplines in Germany

2007-05-25T13:47:00.000+01:00

A touching defence of arts and humanities research.

Film Review: Das Leben der Anderen

2007-05-01T13:56:00.000+01:00

The German film Das Leben der Anderen won the best-foreign-language-film Oscar this year. It was directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, came out in 2006, and has recently arrived at British cinemas.
The film focuses on a Stasi man's surveillance of a writer in the GDR. It is mostly set in East Berlin in 1984 and the 'Others' of the title refers to people in the Stasi, as well as to citizens of the East in general. The film opens at the university in Potsdam where the secret policemen were trained. It goes on to show how banally unfulfilling their work could be and that they did not gain materially from their conformism.

The two main characters in the film are Wiesler who writes the Stasi files and Dreymann who writes plays. Three typewriters link their acts of writing: the typewriter Dreymann writes his plays on, the red-ink Western one he is given and hides under the floor, and the typewriter in the attic where Wiesler creates the reports of what he hears from the bugged flat beneath. Distinctions between these instances of writing is increasingly blurred: the record Wiesler makes of the life he is observing becomes an act of creative writing, whereas the creative professional Dreymann turns to journalism in the aftermath of his friend's suicide and the Western Spiegel magazine manipulates his writing into a piece of anti-GDR propaganda. The film does not make clear that the premise of the Spiegel headline - that the GDR had a high suicide rate - deletes the fact that West Berlin had the highest suicide rate in Europe at the time.
References to Brecht in the film highlight the idea that goodness is scarcely possible because of the social system. The apparently good, Dreymann and his actress girlfriend, become compromised morally. We are shown his alienation from Christa-Maria, and the way she drugs herself and betrays him is not outweighed by her remorse. This is a film which represents women as relatively slight and ignoble - a shame in what is otherwise a gripping and thought-provoking portrayal of the human struggle to be 'ein guter Mensch'.
What the film has to say about surveillance seems reassuring: human fallibility prevented men from entirely conforming to the rigours of the GDR secret police. Wiesler, to a Western mind the bad Stasi spook, is shown to do good. Towards the end of the film, we move forward to the time of the Wende and the aftermath of unification, when the files were opened to the public. The whole GDR era covered is fascinating for viewers who never saw it. Yet this is not a film about an entirely exotic society we cannot relate our present society to. The Stasi never survived long enough for the major technological advances in surveillance. Nowadays, surveillance is much more extensive and perhaps there is less room for the human acts of creativity which allowed Wiesler to shield his subject from interrogation.

Lyrikkritik

2007-04-28T16:44:00.000+01:00

An interesting website for new German poetry, poetics and (under 'Autoren') reviews of new poetry collections is lyrikkritik.de. Bravo!

Leipzig Book Fair

2007-03-23T15:50:00.000Z

The Leipzig Book Fair is now on, from 22 to 25 March. Its aim is to enhance publicity for new books. Publishing houses, authors, readers and journalists meet at the event. The Book Fair provides information on new titles as well as current trends in the German-speaking market.

Work in progress

2007-03-07T16:41:00.000Z

a) as author

The Ophelia myth in German culture
- conference paper
- anthology of Ophelia texts with co-authored introduction
- 'The Ophelia Myth in the GDR' (accepted for publication in the Germanic Review September 2007 issue forthcoming soon)
- invited talks at Swansea and Paderborn universities
- research seminar in series on the national and international in German culture

The body in Holocaust poetry (research in progress)

British poets in the GDR poetry magazine Poesiealbum (research in progress)

b) as editor

Kölner Ausgabe der Werke Heinrich Bölls Band 10, herausgegeben von Viktor Böll und Frank Finlay in Zusammenarbeit mit Ruth J. Owen (in press, due 2007)

c) as conference organiser

Hamlet-Reception in European Cultures

The German film that won the best-foreign-language-film Oscar this year

2007-03-03T14:48:00.000Z

Und der Oscar geht nach... Deutschland. Das Drama "Das Leben der Anderen" (2006) von Regisseur Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck hat die begehrte Trophäe für den besten nicht-englischsprachigen Film gewonnen. Zum dritten Mal in der Geschichte des Oscars ist ein deutscher Film mit derbegehrten Trophäe ausgezeichnet worden.

Call for Papers

2007-03-02T16:44:00.000Z

German Poetry, including translation
We welcome 20-minute papers on any period and all aspects of German-language poetry. Send 200-word abstracts (as e-mail attachments) to Geoff Howes, Bowling Green State University (ghowes@bgnet.bgsu.edu) and Jeff Vahlbusch, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire (vahlbujb@uwec.edu) by 15 April 2007. The conference is being held in Cleveland, Ohio, in November.

Poetry Translation Prize

2007-01-22T16:31:00.000Z

TRANSLATE A POEM FROM ANY LANGUAGE INTO ENGLISH
The Times Stephen Spender Prize 2007 is up and running! Any British resident or British citizen, of any age, is eligible to enter.There are cash prizes, with all winning entries published in a booklet. The last posting date for entries is Friday 25 May 2007. For details and entry forms go to
www.stephen-spender.org
If you want to read last year´s winning entries visit the website.

Eagleton on Poetry

2006-12-26T14:42:00.000Z

Terry Eagleton's new book How to read a poem (Blackwells, 2007 - although on sale in November 2006!) represents a rare attempt to write a contemporary theory of poetry. Poems have been ignored by Theory in all guises; Theory is in fact 'prose theory', only applicable to cultural products which use prose. A little of what Eagleton asserts is contentious and occasionally wayward (he is confused about what assonance is, apparently), but overall this is a worthwhile book, which pulls together many useful reflections on the forgotten genre.

LCB

2006-11-29T18:09:00.000Z

Freitag, 15. Dezember 2006, 20.00 Uhr
Ein Tunnel über der Spree„Berlin im Text“
Berlin als Lebens- und Arbeitsort: Zu dem Schriftstellertreffen „Tunnel über der Spree“ werden Autorinnen und Autoren eingeladen, die sich an der Spree niedergelassen haben. Warum gerade hier? Und was hat das mit dem Schreiben zu tun? Diesen Fragen gehen die Teilnehmer Jörg-Uwe Albig, Jörg Albrecht, Marica Bodrozic, Michael Ebmeyer, Julia Franck, Christina Griebel, Sarah Khan, Tilman Rammstedt, Gregor Sander, David Wagner und Raul Zelik am 14. und 15. Dezember nicht abstrakt nach, sondern diskutieren über mitgebrachte Texte, in denen Berlin eine wie auch immer geartete Rolle spielt. Im Rahmen der öffentlichen Abendveranstaltung, die heute das Treffen beschließt, präsentieren einige der Teilnehmer neue Texte und berichten über die Diskussionen der vergangenen Tage.
Mehr unter: www.lcb.de

Contemporary German Poetry in Australian Translation

2006-10-30T10:33:00.000Z

Mouth to Mouth: Contemporary German Poetry in Translation, ed. Thomas Wohlfahrt and Tobias Lehmkuhl (Giramondo Publishing)
Whilst I do not condone the reading of poetry translations as a means to the original, this collection is one of the more original ones aimed at those English-speakers incapable of learning German. It had its origins in the Translation Workshop held at the Berlin Poesiefestival in June 2003, when ten German-speaking poets and ten Australian poets translated each other's poems. The selection has been expanded to include the work of fifteen poets from Germany, Switzerland and Austria: Thomas Kling, Kathrin Schmidt, Peter Waterhouse, Kerstin Hensel, Ulf Stolterfoht, Joachim Sartorius, Ursula Krechel, Marcel Beyer, Ulrike Draesner, Nico Bleutge, Sabine Scho, Raphael Urweider, Sabine Naef, Uwe Kolbe and Anja Utler. The translators are Australian poets Luke Davies, Dorothy Porter, Robert Gray, Judith Beveridge, Anthony Lawrence, Gig Ryan, Antigone Kefala, Samuel Wagan Watson, Joanne Burns and Peter Skrzynecki, with European poet-translators Michael Hofmann, Andrew Duncan, Richard Dove, Andrew Shields and Tony Frazer.

Büchnerpreis 2006

2006-10-19T22:05:00.000+01:00

The Büchner-Preisträger for 2006 was announced earlier this year to be Oskar Pastior. The author and translator, from Transylvania, is known for his experimental prose texts and Dada-influenced poetry. The award was to have been presented to him officially on 21st October in Darmstadt, but Pastior passed away on 5th October.
His first poetry collection Offne Worte was published in 1964. During a study visit to Vienna in 1968, Pastior decided not to return to Rumania and from 1969 lived in (West-)Berlin. Among his numerous collections are the volumes Das Hören des Genitivs (1997), Villanella & Pantum (2000) and o du roher iasmin. Gedichte zu Charles Baudelaire (2002). Since 2000 the Hanser Verlag has been producing a Pastior-Werkausgabe.

Poetry and Poetics after Celan

2006-10-13T16:28:00.000+01:00

Department of German, Queen Mary, University of London
POETRY AND POETICS AFTER CELAN
The works of Paul Celan have often been described as a turning point in the history of modern German poetry. In the aftermath of Celan issues like the self-referentiality of poetic language, the politics of poetry, the re-discovery of traditional forms of lyrical expression as well as the emergence of a distinctly poetological poetry have dominated debates on the aesthetics of poetry in Germany, Austria and, to a certain extent, Switzerland since the 1970s. This lecture series attempts to explore the sheer richness of contemporary poetry in the German language and to examine the impact of Celan’s uniquely challenging legacy.
24.10.2006 Leonard M Olschner (QMUL): Celans poetologisches Verstummen und Weiter-Sprechen.
5.12.2006 Katrin Kohl (Oxford): "Nach Celan"? - Die Bedeutung Celans für die Geschichte deutschsprachiger Lyrik und Poetik.
16.1.2007 Ryozo Maeda (Tokyo/Berlin): Rätsel und Evidenz: Celan in der medialen Kommunikation heute.
23.1.2007 Karen Leeder (Oxford): Ästhetik der Kälte: epistemological experiment in contemporary German poetry.
6.2.2007 Markus May (Erlangen) :Politik der Paronomasie. Kritische Potentiale sprachspielerischer Dichtung seit Celan.
27.2.2007 Vivian Liska (Antwerpen): Am Schweigen vorbei. Beispiele einer Poetik nach Celan.
20.3.2007 Sandra Pott (KCL): “Arkadien für alle”. Über den Lyriker Durs Grünbein.
8.5.2007 Konstanze Fliedl (Salzburg): Escher-Intarsien. Intertextualität bei Friederike Mayröcker.
22.5.2007 Rüdiger Görner (QMUL): Im Innern der Gedichte. Bemerkungen zum poetischen Prozess am Beispiel von Nicolas Born.

Brecht Events in London

2006-10-11T16:25:00.000+01:00

As part of the Poetry International Festival this Autumn at the South Bank Centre, in the year which is the fiftieth anniversary of Brecht’s death, seven leading German and English poets have been invited to respond to the great German poet.
On Friday 27th October at 7.45 pm in the Purcell Room David Constantine, Andy Croft, Ulrike Draesner, Lavinia Greenlaw, Adrian Mitchell, Albert Ostermaier & Bert Papenfuss will read specially commissioned new ‘translations’ of Brecht. These are translations in the broadest sense: from new versions of classic poems, to original responses to his life and work, and reinterpretations of his personal, poetic and political gestures for our own times. This will be preceded, at 5.45 pm in the Purcell Room, by a discussion with the poets on ‘Brecht’s Poetic Legacy’, chaired by Dr Karen Leeder.

Current academic post

2006-10-01T11:31:00.000+01:00

This is Jesus College, Oxford, where I teach German language and literature.

Berlin

2006-09-05T16:21:00.000+01:00

The literature festival opened in Berlin today. Among the poets reading there are Ulla Hahn, Michael Krüger, Oskar Pastior, Gerhard Rühm, and Lutz Seiler.

Günter Grass and the SS

2006-08-15T15:58:00.000+01:00

The German poet, the SS, erstwhile silence, late revelations, the usual story when it comes to postwar German writers and their entanglements with politics. He was wrong to join the Waffen-SS, wrong to 'forget' the fact whilst propagating an ethics of remembrance, but if there were a revolution here tomorrow, how would you look upon your current conformism? To survive materially, we collaborate sooner or later with a system we more or less know to be immoral. In the end, moral awareness makes hypocrites of us all.

Brinkmann Film

2006-08-14T17:57:00.000+01:00

This summer, the film Brinkmanns Zorn came out, based on the life and last project of the German poet Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, who died at the age of 35 in an RTA in London, in 1975. He left behind a voluminous, unfinished work-in-progress that included many hours of documentary film, audio recordings and photographs. The film incorporates portions of this existing material.
Just a few weeks after his death, Brinkmann's parameter-expanding collection Westwärts 1 & 2 appeared. During his lifetime, Brinkmann published nine other poetry collections and two anthologies of contemporary American poetry translated into German. His critical deconstruction of contemporary culture remains important in postmodern literature.

Aldeburgh Poetry Festival

2006-08-11T16:19:00.000+01:00

The Poetry Trust is an arts organisation which runs the UK's leading annual festival of international contemporary poetry at Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast. The 18th Aldeburgh Poetry Festival takes place 3 – 5 November 2006. Amongst all the English-language poetry on show, German poetry will get a look in, albeit in translation: Durs Grünbein's Ashes for Breakfast (Faber 2005), his first book of poems in English translation, will be given its UK launched at the Festival. It offers a selection of poems from five of the German collections, translated by Michael Hoffmann.