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.

Heinz Czechowski  1935 -2009

Born in Dresden he survived, aged 10, the firebombing and destruction of the city. He published poetry in the GDR was recognised and prized in both East and West Germany and was able to travel on literary visits before the regime collapsed. However of all three poets he expresses most directly the spiritual and psychological homelessness that emerged from the apocalyptic changes of his lifetime, although he could not experience directly the ‘complicity’ that Gunter Eich will have experienced. His poetry has been described as a ‘journey home to strangeness.’ His poetic strategy was rooted in nostalgia, a mourning for another world – the recall of early childhood and childhood places infused with that melancholy which itself is often envisaged as a wasteland. His personality was depressive anyway and last year he died in an institution sick and cut off. He more than the other two expresses a profound sense of disorientation and pessimism and there’s little of the harsh irony informing the triumphal passage to freedom which featured so much post-war writing–his elegiac tone feels a more honest response to history.

I AM WHERE I AM

I am where I am,
and there’s nothing
to indicate that I
could ever be anywhere else
at any rate, in foreseeable time.
Even yesterday I saw
The little villages between Kamenz and Dresden.
Marked by the East, not spared
I went back, there
Where nowadays I am at home.
I saw the beloved in front of her house,
The distant past
Was close again
In the lowlands around Leipzig
I am, at any rate, where I am
Unredeemed and without prospect.

In me
There lives, again lives what died
Yet still ever, and ever again
Reaches me.

ICH BIN, WO ICH BIN, UND NICHTS

Deutet darauf hin, dass ich
Je woanders sein könnte, in
Absehbarer Zeit jedenfalls. Gestern noch
Sah ich die kleinen
Dörfer  zwischen Kamenz und Dresden.
Östlich geprägt und nicht verschont
Fuhr ich zurück, dort hin,
Wo ich jetzt zu Haus bin. Die Liebste
Sah ich vor ihrem Haus,
Die ferne Vergangenheit
War wieder nah
Im Flachland bei Leipzig: Ich jedenfalls
Bin, wo ich bin, unerlöst
Und ohne Aussicht. In mir
Lebt und lebt,was gestorben ist,und mich doch
Immer and immer wieder

In the poem published in 1988 he refers to the great post-war silence ‘what should have been said, was not said’ ; and beyond history he looks around and sees that power and force only change their names as he returns again and again to remembered familiar scenes:

FORTY YEARS AGO

Films underexposed: the pictures move on at a gentle pace,
Always the same landscape: the city
Surrounded by hills where barracks
Emerge and re-emerge.
What’s left is what I see today:
Tinder, in it the treads of tyres
On which we road towards the Elbe
Fish-tackle in our pockets.

The new age couldn’t arise
With all that concrete by the woods.
Behind the blacked-out window
Of the unfamiliar house
I played, forty years ago, with tin soldiers
Marching in step with the generations,
That moved back into the  barracks,
I’ve lost my innocence, what’s remained is force,
Only its names have changed.

I see the faces, overexposed in the floodlights
Of the conference. What, forty years ago
Should have been said
Has not been said, so
I’m returning to my childhood
Unenlightened by history
That draws back into itself
The monstrous
Whose beginning took place
Well before I was a child.

Vor Vierzig Jahren

Unterbelichtete Filme: im Zuckeltrab
Bewegen sich Bilder, immer
Die gleiche Landschaft: die Stadt,
Umgeben von Hügeln, auf denen
Kaserned stehn und
Neue entstehen. Was
Davon übrigblieb, sehe ich heute:
Zunder, darin
Die Profile der Reifen,
Auf denen wir elbwärts fuhren,
AngelschnureIn unseren Taschen

Die neue ZeitKonnte nicht aufkommen
Gegen all den Beton neben den Wäldern.
Hinter den erblindeten Fenstern
Des ausgewohnten Hauses
Spielt ich vor vierzig Jahren
Mit Zinnsoldaten. Im Marschtritt
Der Generationen,
Die einrückten in die Kasernen,
Habe ich meine Unschuld verloren, geblieben
Ist die Gewalt
Nur ihre Namen haben gewechselt.

Ich sehe die Gesichter,
Überbelichtet vom Scheinwerferlicht
Der Kongresse: Was vor Vierzig Jahren
Hatte gesagt werden müssen,
Ist nicht gesagt worden, so
Kehre ich wieder
In meine Kindheit zurück, unbelehrt
Von der Geschichte
Die in sich zurücknimmt
Das Ungeheure, das
Seinen Anfang nahm,
Schon lange bevor ich ein Kind war.

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