"Your Life Jacket is under Your Skin." Reflections on German Poetry of the Seventies

In his afterword to the third Jahrbuch fiir Lyrik, Giinter Kunert describes the poems submitted in 1980 as frostelnde Gedichte whose wintry images, unlike those of the traditional are symptoms not of an individual tragedy, but of ein gesellschaftliches Ereignis, signs of a pervasive sense of alienation in a manipulated society.' The pain articulated in these poems springs from the recognition that in the Megamaschinen of modern life individuals have become phantoms of themselves, with a resultant loss of spontaneity experienced as a kleines Sterben.2 As a parallel example to the anthologized poems, Kunert cites Nicolas Born's last novel, Flilschung, and its depiction of the Fremdbestimmtheit des Ichs, das, selbst unter Lebensgefahr, nicht wieder zur Ursprunglichkeit findet.3 Taking up this thought, a reviewer writes: Immer scharfer versuchen die Autoren in ihren Texten dieses Fremdbestimmtsein zu fassen, selten nur noch bleiben sie im Privaten, in Selbstmitleid und Resignation stecken.'4 What has happened, then, to the subjectivism, which even as recently as 1979 seemed to have reached new heights? Has it simply disappeared, more suddenly even than it came? Was the much proclaimed Tendenzwende merely a flash in the pan?5 It is perhaps understandable that the poets' response to the generally bad press they received in the last years of the seventies (a phenomenon to which I will return in a moment) should be a new turning to the individual as a social, rather than a private being. Alongside what Kunert sees as a concern about the manipulations of modern society (hardly new, when one recalls the typical motifs of the late fifties and early sixties), a dominant theme of the more recent anthologies has been the fear of ecological disaster. Die Grutnen, as the environmentalists are popularly called, have added a special urgency to the once-taboo Gesprach utber Baume6--one poet, for example, whose earlier volumes included the rather self-pitying title Blaue Flecken calls his newest book of poems Schwere Erde, Rauch.7 What might, only a year or two before, have seemed like a renewal of the perennial nature lyric, has taken on a more polemical tone. In spite of this shift of emphasis, however, I would claim that there is more continuity here than at first meets the eye. The subjectivism

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• The Poetry of Gerhard Falkner and the Lyrical Redemption of Language in the Eighties

  Neil H Donahue•The Germanic Review Literature…•1992

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