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.

Durs Grünbein  1962 was born in Dresden and studied natural sciences thinking to become a vet; although he changed his mind, his studies sparked an enduring fascination with creatures generally. He’s the most recent and most celebrated of the three poets– highly lauded,  a real star in the German poetry scene for his youth, brilliance, knowledge and scope; but above all perhaps for his participation in the modern zeitgeist: streetwise, ironic, and witty style and take on the world; part of that zeitgeist is the sense of ‘ get-over-it, move-on’ and his poetic style exemplifies that attitude. Already celebrated, his liberation from DDR led to continual travel and poetic material. His ironic tone appears  at first to reveal little of the emotional  homelessness of the other two. The rubble and ruin of the Germany the other two experienced nevertheless became a theme, a  starting point for seeing rubble and ruin across the world in the distant past and everywhere in the present. His response to the triumphal shine of the West was largely sceptical as the first two poems show. Nevertheless he spent 10 years composing a collection  of 49 traditionally formed 10-line poems dedicated to the once incredibly beautiful city of Dresden and of that city’s destruction. However the first two poems here – though ironic, witty cool etc. nevertheless reveal a similar disorientation, distance and a sense of death and the ephemeral as those of Czechowski:

Arcadia for Everyone

It’s not just the city centre, deserted Sunday morning,
the letters marked unknown at this address.
In the sea-shell sound on the phone the quiet Who’s there?
not the thousands of cars abandoned at the roadside
nor the stolen poetry on hoardings no one reads,
scrawlings on busts of schoolbook worthies in the parks —
it’s all of this and more you gladly shut your eyes to
feeding just one suspicion: swollen up to a metropolis
so this is how place looks where they buried the god like a dog.
Arcadia, graveyard of the heavenly, like any city
where death enters and leaves, life’s on privatised grounds.
So much for the idyllic, the happy lands, the rustic
Hideaways. Whatever shepherds sang to, travellers ever dreamed of.
This is the showcase: City and gorod, metropolis or ville.
It’s here you pass, your own spirit, beneath stoical trees
sleepless glass person, reflected in too-much-of-everything.
Glances set the beat, reflections urbane, no eclogues
In which Daphne flirts, Milon and Lakon watch out for each other.
Your vertebrae vibrate with the arches of the bridge,
you sense your skeleton, your face gets lost,
dazzled by the metallic glare of puddles; and yet
there’s nowhere else so homely. It was first here that,
in an accustomed exile, where nights you’d crawl
into your mouse-hole, were crumbs of happiness.
Where else, but in heavy traffic aimless,
Was one ever so alive, was one ever so removed
From lazy posthumous peace.

ARKADIEN :

Nicht nur das Zentrum, menschenleer am Sonntagvormittag,
Die briefe, gestempelt mit dem Vermerk Empfänger unbekannt.
Das Meeresrauschen am Telephon, in die Stille das‚ Bitte?’
Die tausenden Autos, von den Besitzern verlassen am Strassenrand,
Auch die Reklametafeln mit den Dichterplagiaten, die keiner liest,
In den Parks, grell beschmiert, die Monumente der Schulbuchidole,
Diesa alles und mances, wovor man die Augen gern schliesst,
Nährt den einen Verdacht. So also sieht, aufgeschwollen zur metropole,
Der ort aus, an dem man den Gott einst begrub wie einen Hund.
Arkadien, Friedhof der Himmlischen,ihm gleicht jede Stadt,
Wo der Tod ein-und ausgeht, das Leben auf privatisiertem Grund.
Von wegen Idylle, Landschaft  der Seligen, bukolisches Reservat.
Was immer Hirten besangen, wovon die Reisenden träumten –
Dies ist der Schauplatz.  City und gorod, metropolis oder ville.
Hier geht man, sein eigener Geist, unter stoischen Bäumen,
Ein gläserner Mensch, schlaflos, sich spiegelnd im Vielzuviel.
Den Takt geben Blicke, urbane Reflexe, nicht die Eklogen,
In denen Daphnis flirtete, Milon un Lakon einander beschützten.
Man spürt sein Skelett, Vertebrat im Vibrato der Brückenbogen,
Verliert das Gesicht, geblender vom metallischen Glanz der Pfützen,
Und ist doch nirgends so heimisch. Erst hier, im gewohnten Exil,
Wo man nachts in sein Mauseloch kroch, gab es Krümel bom Glück.
Wann sonst, wenn nicht im dichten Verkehr, untewegs ohne Ziel,
War man je so vital, so dem faulen, posthumen Frieden entrückt?

Durs Grünbein