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Michael Hofmann

When it came to making a selection of 20th century German [language] poetry for an evening's reading, I followed two lights. On the one hand, I wanted things that were poems, that took no stand on or had no truck with outside developments.

Kafka is famous, in his diary, for having marked the date of the beginning of World War One with a note of slight personal unwellness. But others were more readily infected, Rilke – on the face of it not much more worldly than Kafka – wrote his five notorious Gesange of August 1914, full of clanking phallic imagery. Thomas Mann, just as pro-War, as most of the writers unfortunately were, in Germany but elsewhere in Europe too, disappeared into his Betrachtungen Eines Unpolitischen, finally published when it was too late, in 1918. (His democratic education, if thorough, was also long.) Others were still more direct. The Austrian experimental poet Ernst Jandl wrote a concrete poem about 1944 and 1945 called 'marking a turn' in English: that goes war war war sixteen times, then may. While unforgettable and indelible, it's not perhaps the greatest thing to read aloud.

So I chose things that reflected the German century (and you might say what a German century it's been): War, dictatorship, exile, War again, Shoah, civilian bombing, POW camps, postwar trauma and rebuilding are all here – but I also wanted to include poems that followed the timeless and on the whole innocent pursuits of poets of all epochs and places: lost love, flowers, heck, poetry. There's a curious dichotomy whereby many of the greatest and best-known poems are haunted by historical subjects – Trakl's 'Grodek', Eich's 'Inventory', the aforementioned Jandl poem – while a number of the greatest poets – Rilke, Benn, in some ways even Brecht – did their best to ignore them.

I chose as few poems as I could – the result is a poet's or an innumerate's dozen – rationed myself to one poem per poet (except, at the organizer's reasonable request, Rilke), tried to find the usual pollster's range of man and woman, young and old, German and Austrian, East and West, and spread them really very evenly through the century's decades. (A third of the translations are mine, pretty much the same proportion as in the book from which all the poems are drawn.) I am aware of not offering Brecht's 'Poor B.B.' or Celan's 'Deathfugue' or Rilke's 'Archaic Torso', but that's all in the rules of this game: you can't have everything. I am in fact strangely pleased with the lineaments of my sequence: the way it both reflects (Erb) and ignores (Celan) Germany, its living in present (Trakl) and past (Piontek), its solipsism (Benn) and its interest in others (Benn again – same poem), its openness to East and West (Beyer and Grosz), in the wider sense. It looks like a turning centre in a turning world to me. And, at the beginning and ending is Rilke, a marginal, even slightly discredited figure in Germany today, and never – like all those writers born before 1880, Yeats, Cavafy, etc – truly modern, but a great poet for all that. He begins, in the famous 'Autumn', soothingly, really a little cloyingly, amidst the manuscript rustle of leaves on the avenue, and disappears in the wild cosmic lostness of Ausgesetzt Auf Den Bergen Des Herzens, exposed, cast out, abandoned, on the mountains of the heart.

© Michael Hofmann, 2008

About Michael Hofmann

Michael Hofmann was born in Freiburg, Germany, in 1957, and came to England in 1961. He is the author of four books of poems, and a Selected Poems, just published. His criticism is collected in the volume Behind The Lines: Pieces On Writing And Pictures, from 2001. He has made many translations from the German, including works by Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Roth, Irmgard Keun, Franz Kafka, Thomas Bernhard and Durs Grünbein. In 2005, he edited the Faber Book Of Twentieth-Century German Poems.

Michael Hofmann favourite poems

• Rainer Maria Rilke, 'Autumn Day'
• Georg Trakl, 'Grodek'
• George Grosz, 'Hymn to the World'
• Bertolt Brecht, 'Place of Refuge'
• Günter Eich, 'Inventory'
• Nelly Sachs, 'But who emptied your shoes of sand...'
• Gottfried Benn, 'Chopin'
• Inge Müller, 'The Black Cart'
• Paul Celan, 'Don't write yourself...'
• Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 'In Memory of William Carlos Williams'
• Heinz Piontek, 'Circa 1800'
• Elke Erb, 'N.'s Identity'
• Durs Grünbein, 'MonoLogical Poem #2'
• Marcel Beyer, 'Jihad Sounds of Home'
• Rainer Maria Rilke, 'Exposed on the cliffs of the heart'

Related links

Michael Hofmann

• Michael Hofmann at www.contemporarywriters.com