Translated by Edmund Jephcott, with an essay by Ritchie Robertson

‘What use are poets in time of need?’ Hölderlin

This volume is a record of an urgent, spontaneous conversation about German poetry in the twentieth century. Because of its poetic intimacy and detail, this exchange between close literary colleagues also constitutes a profound text on the essence of poetry itself.

The conversation centres on the life and work of the major German modern poet, Peter Huchel (1903–81), whom both authors knew personally. Huchel first published in the 1920s and 1930s, knew ‘inner emigration’ in Nazi Germany in the 1940s, before being forced again into inner then outer emigration at the hands of the regime of the German Democratic Republic in the 1960s and early 1970s. It is because of this long history of imposed and self-imposed isolation that he is still one of Europe’s least known great poets.

Focusing on the survival of poetry, and on the tenuous existence of resistant poetry, in Nazi Germany and during the most rigid years of the East Germany regime, the volume forms an extensive reflection on a neglected aspect of the history of German literature and, through the testimony of numerous examples, is
an assertion of poetry’s survival in extreme and hostile environments. It is of relevance, not only to Germany’s past, but to the situation of poets of any country under political duress, or forced into inner or outer exile.

Ritchie Robertson’s essay is a carefully weighed consideration of Peter Huchel’s life and work, and the difficult, often exemplary decisions he was compelled to make about questions of politics and literature, which still arouse controversy in present-day Germany and in the wider world.

Published by Libris in 2006