Which Airport Next?
Ruth J. Owen follows the trail of Contemporary German Poets

The intellectual flâneur, not serving a cause or a country but characterised by his irony and caprice, is a recurrent figure in the work of contemporary German poets: for a politically-aspirational poet like Volker Braun – whose recent collections include Die Zickzackbrücke (The Zigzag Bridge), Lustgarten Preußen (The Pleasance, Prussia), and Tumulus – this bohemian wanderer can be part of an expression of despair, whereas for others the poet's location on the periphery, disconnected in a fraying, centreless world, is taken for granted; many would hardly expect to find the poet anywhere else at the turn of the second millennium. The lives of German poets today appear far removed, however, from Braun's images of the beggar-poet on the street or the alpine poet abseiling into oblivion: forever in transit internationally, they collect countless airmiles, jetting between Goethe-Institut readings, literary festivals, and positions as writers-in-residence.

In his collection Seumes Brille (Seume's Spectacles), published in 2000, Heinz Czechowski opens a poem entitled 'Der Dichter' ('The Poet') with the observation 'Man reist mit verschiedenen Manuskripten / Rund um den Erdball' ('One travels around the globe with different manuscripts'). Czechowski's poems characteristically worry away at their own assertions and indeed this statement is subsequently retracted in the poem. But the notion of German poets as eager travellers, if not circumnavigators of the globe, is suggested widely by collections and cycles such as Durs Grünbein's 'Veneziana' (Venice Poems) from his wide-ranging collection Nach den Satiren (After the Satires). Grünbein, the sharpest German poet of the last decade, evokes countless locations beyond Europe, from the West Indies to Angkor Vat. The established literary fascination with the USA continues both in his California poems and in cycles such as Steffen Mensching's 'New York Lines' of 1999. Here the poems' American-English titles trace urban localities observed by the traveller, recalling the many German poems of the 1990s which import English brand names and English business-speak (which today is often euphemistically termed 'neudeutsch'). Unbounded by geographical borders, the globalized poem is obsessed with the virtual and anonymous spaces common across Western industrialised countries. Thus the misery of the simulacrum is thematized in Steffen Mensching's Berliner Elegien (Berlin Elegies) through evocations of screen images and the technique of recycling advertising slogans.

International perspectives are further, if differently, exemplified by poets' interest in natural science. In poetry of the last decade science is not part of a political discourse about the environment or nuclear warfare, however, as it was elsewhere in post-1945 German literature. Rather it is a discourse which young German poets, in common with their British and Austrian counterparts, are representing as their intellectual heritage. Drawing on physics and biology, they transform quantum theory and cognitive science into verse, while scientific methods of measurement become metaphors for writing. Uncommon scientific knowledge can be part of a bravura performance but this poetry, such as Durs Grünbein's impressive collection Falten und Fallen (the title could be variously translated as 'Wrinkles and Traps' or 'Folding and Falling'), also challenges any assumption that science could be a sphere cordoned off from artists. For those German poets who lived within the closed borders of the GDR the consciously international themes of global travel, media and science might have been seen as a response to the opening up of eastern Germany after 1989. They apparently posit the end of a localised (and now stigmatised) national identity. Literary groups – both regional and generational – were always very important in the GDR, particularly the Saxon School of Poets, but also Prenzlauer Berg and other 'underground' scenes. Several commentators predicted that such collective identities would disappear as soon as the western book market extended eastwards after unification. However, dedications, quotations and other forms of intertextuality reflect a continuing sense of comradeship among ex-GDR poets. These identifications cross the boundaries of the older groupings based on age and instead seem based on a shared GDR origin. Indeed, the GDR itself has been mythologized in 1990s poetry as the origin to which the traveller or exile comes home. Homecoming from abroad is thus less a return to contemporary German society than a journey into its recent past. Wolfgang Hilbig writes this history as a landscape traversed in his (excellent but critically neglected) epic poem prosa meiner heimatstraße (my home road's prose). In Czechowski's collection Mein westfälischer Frieden (My Peace of Westphalia) there are many references to eastern German cities left behind both by Czechowski and by the speaking subject of his slowly ambling poems.

Dresden emerged as a significant topos in German poetry in the mid-1960s and 1970s. More recently, it has been taken up in the poetry of, for example, Barbara Köhler, whose compelling collections include Deutsches Roulette (German Roulette) and Blue Box. Such poets seem to be attracted to the supernatural, mythical and abstract, whereas the earlier poetry of this city evoked a 'material' experience of rubble, skeletons and nature. Precisely, given their much-acknowledged concern with technology and anonymous modish urbanity, the recent poets' retention of Dresden motifs puts in doubt notions of being post-history and post-national-identity. It raises questions about whether younger poets are in fact telling the same histories, or whether the older generation's earnest convictions vis-à-vis history and politics must be set against a predominant irony, a flippant toying with inherited material, in more recent work. For German poets, Dresden's destruction in 1945 is an ineradicable part of the city and its literature today: Berlin is likewise presented as a mediated city of second-hand as well as first-hand experiences. The returning traveller in search of identity has to go underground into Berlin bunkers, onto a film set or through some other diorama. Far from a nostalgic attitude to the past (an accusation levelled against ex-GDR poets in the early 1990s), many poems thus articulate a dark sense of haunting national history which lurks, unclaimed, in the ground or in the architecture of the German cityscape – and which conceivably induces the predominating global jaunts of the intellectual flâneurs.

Ruth J. Owen completed a D.Phil. at Oxford in 2000 and is currently a visiting fellow at the Humboldt University in Berlin, where she is researching body aesthetics in modern poetry. Recent publications include The Poet's Role: Lyric Responses to German Unification (Editions Rodopi B.V., 2001) and articles on various aspects of GDR poetry and contemporary poetry.