Many poets live in  exile, severed from the cultural roots of their writing and needing to find new sources for their writing. In the case of poets from the former German Democratic Republic of communist East Germany these roots became peculiarly distorted and invalidated by the catastrophes of the 20th century: WW1 followed by the great Depression; the subversion of all cultural life by the Nazi regime; WW11 and the firebombing that reduced many cities to stone-age conditions and which could not be mourned due to the felt complicity of the population at large; the Russian occupation followed by the totalitarian communist regime; finally the propulsion into late 20th century consumer capitalism. In West Germany over a long period of the mid 20th century there was a reckoning and continuing struggle to come to terms with the Nazi past and degrees of complicity in it which shaped radically West German society and its culture. But not in East Germany where Nazism was interpreted simply as a violent consequence of capitalism.

The collapse of the GDR regime and communism generally led to a widespread view that those forty-five years or so of history had been a history of failure and invalidity. The result was, for many people and poets especially, an immense hole in the fabric of their culture and cultural memory. Furthermore the devastation of the immediate post-war was met by a great silence in German literature, as the writer W.G. Sebald has explored in his essay: ‘ Between History and Natural History: on the literary description of total destruction’. This silence was partly due to the impossibility of comprehending what had happened and partly to the sense that they, the people, were complicit in their own downfall. Thus it was to take a long time before people could speak of such horrors as the firebombing of, for example, Dresden. What kind of terrain was this for the poet?

The poems of Günter Eich, Heinz Czechowski and Durs Grünbein, poets all born in East Germany and overlapping chronologically,  illustrate the very different ways poets may survive the assaults on the histories and purposes of their homelands and consequent sense of alienation and homelessness, barely alleviated by the subsequent freedoms of the West. Each developed a particular strategy to create a home for and in poetry. Günter Eich experienced the Third Reich, the army and being a prisoner of war; but he died before the liberation of the GDR. Heinz Czechowski was born in Dresden and aged ten experienced its destruction; he travelled in the West before and after the liberation ands died there. Durs Grünbein was also born in Dresden in 1962 and has subsequently travelled and lived in the West.

The following poems are chosen to illustrate these different strategies.

Günter Eich 1907 – 1972

Was born in Lebus on the Oder on the far eastern frontiers of Germany. He studied economics and Chinese but became a full-time writer. He wrote many radio plays, which in Germany have a more important literary status than in England; but during the Nazi and wartime period he wrote virtually no poetry. He started writing poetry again as a prisoner of war. His writing was fully acknowledged and prized. He belonged to a pre-war literary movement that coined the phrase ‘inner emigration’ –inward being the only place one could go in a terror regime – but actually as a region to escape from any inhospitable milieu. One component of this was the essential timelessness of poetry and its a-political nature. Günter Eich immersed himself in the natural world which he found full of message and meaning. This was hardly popular at a time when, in the immediate post-war period with the revelations of the holocaust, the general sentiment was ‘how can one write about trees after Auschwitz’. More than half a century later perhaps, our recognition of a nature devastated and the consequences of that devastation in view, we now appreciate that trees might be the most healing things a poet could write about.

A poem written while he was still prisoner-of-war, all around rubble and desolation, calls up long-gone epochs of naive nature poetry; it’s called ‘Sun In October Mist’

SUN IN OCTOBER MIST

Sun in October mist
And the hedgerows flaring red
I look on with a desire
Whose source lies far off

When, beauty at the point of tears
Autumn was my happiness,
Those feelings, those colours
Reach me now as new.

The moment and permanence vanish
Under the startled eyelid
There where the reflection of the forest
Encloses me in its light.

SONNE IM OKTOBERNEBEL

Sonne im Oktobernebel
Und die Hecke rot entflammt
Seh ich an mit dem Begehren,
das aus alten Jahren stammt,

als die schönheit tränennahe
und der Herbst mir Wollust war,
solches Fühlen, solche Farben
reicht er mir erneuert dar.

Augenblick und Dauer schwinden
Unter dem erschrocknen Lid,
da der Widerschein der Wälderin sein Licht mich einbezieht.

By 1955 Eich had already published a collection ‚ Messages of the Rain’ in which his absorption in the natural world is established; in spite of the general anti-nature, anti-lyrical intellectual climate of that time he could write the following:

END OF SUMMER

Who would wish to live without the comfort of the trees?

How right they should take part in dying.
The peaches have been picked, the plums are darkening
While beneath the arches of the bridge time roars.

It is to the bird migrations I entrust my despair
Calmly they measure out a share in eternity.
Their passage seen through foliage is a dark force
The movement of wings tinges the fruit.

What’s needed is patience.
Soon the bird’s script will be deciphered.
Under the tongue is a coin to be tasted.

ENDE EINES SOMMERS

Wer möchte leben ohne den Trost der Bäume!

Wie gut, dass sie am Sterben teilhaben!
Die pfirsiche sind geerntet, di Pflaumen färben sich,
während unter dem Bruckenbogen die Zeit rauscht.

Dem Vogelzug vertraue ich meine Verzweiflung an.
Er misst seinen Teil von Ewigkeit gelassen ab.
Seine Strecken
Werden sichtbar im Blattwek als dunkler Zwang,
die Bewegung der Flügel färbt die Früchte.

Es heisst Geduld haben.
Bals wird die Vogelschrift entsiegelt,
unter der Zunge ist der Pfennig zu schmecken.

From the same collection is his poem ‘Pigeons’  in which he already appears to foresee the Gaia hypothesis that the earth and its mysteries can survive without us and the entire realm of nature is not under our control, many years before these ideas were current:

PIGEONS

The flight of pigeons across the fields, —
a beat of the wing, swifter than the beauty
that cannot keep up,but remains
in my heart as disquiet.

As if the laughter of pigeons could be caught
in front of the dovecotes, green-painted dwarf dwellings,
and I begin to wonder
if flight matters to them,
what rank they give to the earthward glance,
what place to the pecking of grain,to the spotting of hawks.

I tell myself I should fear pigeons:
you are not the master when you scatter grain,
when you fasten a message to plumage,
when you breed new strains, new colours,
new crests, new tufts about the foot.
Put no trust in your power,
So you’ll not be amazedto learn how little you count,

that beyond your kind are hidden kingdoms,
soundless languages that will not be discovered,
dominions powerless and unassailable,
decisions made in the flight of pigeons.

TAUBEN

Taubenflug über die Äcker hin, —
Ein Flügelschlag, der schneller ist als die Schönheit.
Sie holt ihn nicht ein, sondern bleibt mir
Als Unbehagen zurück im Herzen.

Als wäre auch taubengelächter vernhembar
Vor den Schlägen, den grün gestrichenen Zwerghäusern,
ob der Flug ihnen wichtig ist,welchen Rang die Blicke zum Erdboden haben
und wie sie das Aufpicken des korns einordnenund das Erkennen des Habichts.

Ich rate mir selbst, mich vor den Tauben zu fürchten.
Du bist nicht ihr Herr, sage ich, wenn du Futter streust,
wenn du Nachrichten an ihre Federn heftest,
wenn du Zierformen züchtest, neue Farben,
neue Schöpfe, Gefieder am Fuss.
Vertrau deiner Macht nicht,
so wirst du auch nichtverwundert sein,
wenn du erfährst, dass du unwichtig bist,

dass neben deinesgleichen heimliche Königsreiche bestehen,
Sprachen ohne Laut, die nicht erforscht werden,
Herrschaften ohne Macht und unangreifbar,
dass die Entscheidungen geschehen im Taubenflug.

Thus for Günter Eich nature could be a refuge for the ‘inner emigration’.

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