The poet Reiner Kunze turns 90 –
[ad_1]
He's thought of by his fellow poet Marian Nakitsch to be the “handyman of silence”. Others uncover a “rhetoric of silence” in his poetry. And Reiner Kunze himself is aware of how treasured each verse is. “I like to take a seat down with the deaf-mute, peeling my lips / phrases,” says his poem “Dimension”, written three years after leaving the GDR in 1980. “Nearly solely the deaf // he can pay attention will perceive / And solely the mute know what it means / to battle in useless for a phrase.”
Nowhere within the German-language poetry of the prolonged current is it extra concise, lowered, arid, with just a few surprisingly blossoming pictures within the dry terrain. That is definitely a query of temperament and origin. Because the son of a miner, born in Oelsnitz within the Ore Mountains in 1933, he typically described how lazy his childhood was with out missing in heat.
Cassiber as second nature
However additionally it is a mode of talking that assessments anew with each phrase what may be mentioned, which is known on the identical time and doesn't set off any misunderstandings. Critics have used the time period “Kassiber” for this, i.e. the message secretly smuggled out of isolation, whose real-socialist, extremely skilled finesse turned second nature to him.
He by no means needed to know something about political poetry as such. Neither on the time when the previous GDR mannequin pupil, who was helped by the SED to get his highschool diploma, grew doubts concerning the regime and fell out along with his instructors whereas learning journalism on the “Purple Monastery” in Leipzig; nonetheless in his new Bavarian house of Obernzell-Erlau close to Passau, the place he may lastly have voiced criticism of his nation unhindered. What started in 1968 along with his withdrawal from the occasion after Russian troops invaded Prague led to 1976 along with his expulsion from the writers’ affiliation: he had printed “The Fantastic Years” in Frankfurt’s S. Fischer Verlag, which in concise prose scenes described the ideological coaching strategies of the GDR portrayed.
Kunze, a person of clear phrases in conversations and essays, needed no less than to guard poetry from instrumentalization. He solely accepted politics insofar because it had a direct existential influence. Nevertheless, he remained a straightforward ally for the “meat and warfare wolves of bare anti-communism”, as Heinrich Böll known as those that embraced Kunze, primarily due to his biography, in his eulogy for the Georg Büchner Prize in 1977. Böll, who by his friendship with Lew Kopelev had an concept of the extent of real-socialist repression, not like different elements of the West German left, didn't keep a naive relationship with the GDR and was subsequently capable of reward the poet as “hidden within the dugout between the roaring propaganda fleets”.
Within the identify of Franz Josef Strauss
To this present day, nevertheless, Kunze is related to these arch-conservative circles, for instance the Hanns Seidel Basis, which awarded him the Franz Josef Strauss Prize in 2015. This can be understood in his political statements on asylum or Sharia. As a person of old style integrity, one doesn't wish to accuse him of this closeness as a long-time prisoner, particularly because the hostilities from the left that started parallel to his departure hit him arduous. Considerate, self-critical and undemagogic as he's, one ought to fairly give him credit score for wanting to maintain alive the reminiscence of resistance and dissidence within the GDR with the Reiner and Elisabeth Kunze Basis with the assistance of hundreds of collected paperwork.
For his ninetieth birthday, a pleasant little material quantity now presents his whole poetic oeuvre – minus just a few early poems that he not accepts. In it one can uncover the naturalist lyricist within the custom of Peter Huchel and Johannes Bobrowski, the phrasesmith who couldn’t do away with Bertolt Brecht, the love poet and the admirer and dialogue associate of Czech poetry, which his spouse Elisabeth launched to him: Additionally as a translator, for instance, of the fantastic Jan Skácel Kunze has huge deserves.
However the assortment additionally reveals a culture-conservative spirit, which complains, for instance, in “Junge Motorradfahrer” (1983): “Even due to you / I'm deaf / presently // full throttle when idling”. He goes to court docket with smartphones and listens to a “live performance with works of the twenty first century” (2006): “We had been granted the privilege of dwelling / after the frenzy of hundreds of years / earlier than the music // nevertheless it was unmistakable / the frenzy / after the music”. In honor of Kunze’s love for the music of Mozart or Dvořák, which has typically been testified to poetically: within the poem as a spot that, in keeping with Kunze’s personal understanding, shies away from easy judgement, such remarks haven't any place.
[ad_2]
0 comments