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Durs Grünbein
Das erste Jahr. Berliner Aufzeichnungen
(The First Year. Berlin Sketches)
Suhrkamp Verlag, September 2001. 280pp As the year 2000 ended and the new year of 2001 was heralded in, Durs Grünbein, perhaps the best-known poet living in Germany today, stood with his friends on his balcony in Berlin and watched the fireworks raining over all the neighbourhoods of the city. This book encapsulates his thoughts, aspirations and inspirations during the preceding twelve months. The prologue sets the tone and standard of the prose that awaits us in his notebooks, of the entries in which this volume consists. Here are his musings on the passing of time, on mortality, or on the mark of the individual person in the world - subjects he picks up again at other points throughout the year, whether prompted by wanderings through the ancient streets of Pompeii, encountering Nero in a dream, or looking back over the past decade during which he raced through the major cities of the world. A lot of ground is covered in the course of these entries, none of it superficially, whether the poet, as he sits at his desk looking onto leafy Savigny Platz, is turning his thoughts to the role of the writer, or being reminded, by the sight of the crows in the trees, of days spent in Krakow or of a painful childhood encounter with a condor. 'Here I distil my particular alcohol of 12% Weltschmerz, 80% rebellion against time, and a tiny left-over of pride that I turn into verse', is how he once described the make-up of his writing, and the formula still holds.
Some of the entries are of an intimate, personal nature, others range more widely, touching on all sorts of subjects from neo-Nazism and the Berlin Wall to the second-rate descriptions of women in much contemporary fiction. There is even a sketch of Hitler using the Führer's typewriter as its focus. And scattered throughout the work are portraits of great artists and writers: Cézanne, Baudelaire, Mandelstam, Nietzsche. An immensely satisfying and lyrical experience.
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