German Literature

Kirsch

Sarah Kirsch (1935-2013)

Sarah Kirsch is one of Germany’s greatest poets. From 1988 onwards, she also wrote a series of magical volumes of short prose. Her poetry is characterised by its acute, lyrical observations of the natural world (and its transformation by humans). She was awarded the Büchner Prize in 1996. Commenting on her work, the critic Joachim Kaiser wrote:

Gelassen zumeist, aber nach Kräften unversöhnlich, witzig manchmal, doch auch prosaisch karg, wundergläubig und tapfer verzweifelt abwiegelnd: so vermag Sarah Kirsch zu dichten über letzte wie nächste Dinge.

Calm for the most part, but unforgiving to the best of her ability, funny at times, but also prosaically sparse, believing in miracles and bravely and desperately dismissive: this is how Sarah Kirsch is able to write poetry about the big things and the small familiar things.

Sarah Kirsch was born Ingrid Bernstein in Limlingerode in Thuringia and grew up in Halberstadt. In 1958 she married the poet Rainer Kirsch. In 1959 she completed her degree in Biology from Halle University. From 1960 onwards she adopted the name Sarah in order to show her solidarity with Jews.

In 1963-65 Sarah Kirsch attended the Institute for Literature in Leipzig where she studied with the legendary teacher Georg Maurer (1907-1971), who compelled his students to aim for ‘Genauigkeit’ (precision) in their work. Mauer taught Kirsch and her fellow students:

daß man nicht die großen “philosophischen” Gedichte machen soll, wie das im Sozialismus üblich war, so etwas wie der späte Becher machte, soviel Verblasenes hat man ja selten gehört. Davon hat uns Maurer wenigstens abgehalten, das nachzuahmen. Er sagte, wir sollten lieber den kleinen Gegenstand nehmen.

that you shouldn’t write the great ‘philosophical’ poems, as was customary under socialism, something like the late [Johannes R.] Becher did, you’ve rarely heard so much hot air. Maurer at least discouraged us from imitating that. He said that instead we should focus on a small object.

[source: Isabelle Lehn, Sascha Macht and Katja Stopka, ‘Vorbemerkung’ to Sarah Kirsch, ‘Im Spiegel: Poetische Konfession’, Sinn und Form 6 (2013), available here]

Her first volume of poetry, Gespräch mit dem Saurier (1965; Conversation with the Saurian) was co-authored with Rainer Kirsch. At this time, she was earning her living translating poems from Russian into German. Her second volume of poetry, Landaufenthalt (1967, A Stay in the Country) was sole authored. This collection contains a number of important poems: ‘Legende über Lilja’ is about a Holocaust victim called Lilja. In section 13 of the poem she talks about ‘Die Richter von Frankfurt’ (the judges of Frankfurt); this refers to the fact that the West German Bundestag only decided to change the statute of limitations in 1965, finally making it possible to prosecute former Nazi war criminals. ‘Fahrt II’ describes a train journey ‘[am] Rand meines Lands’ (‘near the edge of my country’) where the border is closed off by barbed wire. Behind the barbed wire are people who speak the same language and know the same elegies by Andreas Gryphius.

In 1968 Sarah Kirsch divorced Rainer Kirsch and had a brief relationship with Karl Mickel, father of her only son Moritz Kirsch (born 1969, a geologist). In 1976 she signed the letter protesting against the expulsion of Wolf Biermann from the GDR. She left the GDR in 1977, and in 1983 she settled in the village of Tielenhemme, in the Dithmarschen area of Schleswig-Holstein, where she spent the rest of her life. For many years she had a relationship with the composer Wolfgang von Schweinitz; in 1980-81 he set her poem cycle Papiersterne (Paper Stars) to music. From the late 1980s onwards, she began writing prose as well as poetry. In 1992 Kirsch was granted access to her Stasi files, an experience she writes about in Das simple Leben (1994, The Simple Life). Rhys W. Williams argues: ‘There is more room in her prose for reflection, for paradox, for opinion and for untidy emotions like anger and the struggle to control it; the poems represent the distillation of what emerges after the primary process has taken place’ (see reading list below, Rhys W. Williams, p. 90).

Sarah Kirsch’s work is influenced by (among others) Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Gertrude Stein and Elizabeth Bishop.

Allerlei-Rauh. Eine Chronik (1988) (All-Kinds-of-Fur: A Chronicle)

In this slim volume of prose, Kirsch writes a chronicle of her life, or rather, of her different lives in different Germanies, covering her childhood in Nazi Germany, her three decades in the GDR and her present life in Schleswig-Holstein (West Germany) in 1988. As the narrator explains early on:

Ich hatte mehrere Leben, die sich voneinander stark unterschieden, und wenn das eine endete, das nächste begann und es galt, schnell ein paar Abgründe zu überwinden und wieder Land zu sehen, auf dem sich ausschreiten ließ [...] (p. 36)

I had several lives that were very different from each other, and when one ended, the next began and I had to get over a few chasms quickly and see land again on which to step out […]

And she adds that all these transformations – like a snake shedding its old skin – have created ‘das bunteste hilfreiche Kino im Kopf’ (p. 36; a colourful cinema in my head). The cinema in her head is ‘helpful’ because it provides her with images to write about, as her life turns slowly like a kaleidoscope (p. 7).

Allerlei-Rauh is structured as a series of contrasts between Kirsch’s childhood, her present life in the West and her former life in the East. The narrator is well aware that in the late 1980s both Germanies are heavily militarised. On the very first page, she comments that one of her neighbours works for the ‘Bundesarmee […], die selbstverständlich in der Einöde ihre Verstecke besitzt’ (p. 7) (The Bundeswehr, which of course has its hideouts in this solitude). She speaks dismissively about all state borders, including the border between Germany and Denmark: ‘Was mir nun deutlich vor Augen steht, […ist], daß man hier, wenn man von Staatsgrenzen absieht, und ich tue es nun schon seit langem, sich recht eigentlich doch auf Jylland befindet’ (‘What is now clear to me [...] is that, if one disregards national borders, and I have been doing that for a long time now, then here we are actually on the Jutland peninsula’).

The title Allerlei-Rauh is from a Grimms’ fairy tale (1819) about a young woman who wears a mantle made from the furs of many animals. Her father attempts to marry her(!) and so she runs away to a different kingdom, where she finds a job in the palace kitchen. Kirsch includes her own version of the Grimms’ tale, setting it in modern times. In her version, the young woman’s father is a furrier from Leipzig who becomes deranged after spending time in a prisoner of war camp (p. 43). In order to escape her criminal father (who represents the oppressive East German state), the young woman flees to the West where she meets and marries an American GI instead.

Although arranged neatly into long paragraphs, Allerlei-Rauh has an ambitious composite structure which blends past, present, future, dream, fantasy and literary allusions – rather like the ‘all kinds of fur’ in the title. The text includes a dream sequence in which the narrator meets two men in ragged uniforms – the kind of uniform worn by soldiers in Schiller’s play Wallenstein’s Camp, set during the Thirty Years’ War. The two men are ghosts and she finds their sarcophagi – perhaps this means that she, too, is a ghost. Later on in the narrative, she imagines that she has been dead for centuries, and returns to observe what human beings are doing, and finds that they are engaged in the same nonsense as before (p. 89).

The narrator recalls the miraculous summer that she spent in Mecklenburg with her friends Christa Wolf and Gerhard Wolf – Wolf also wrote about this happy summer in Sommerstück (1989) [Summer Play].

Kirsch's pacifism and anti-militarism are evident throughout the text, for example when she observes ‘[dass] ein paar Düsenjäger unidentifizierbarer Nationen ihren bombastischen Kappes trieben’ (p. 24; a pair of jet fighters of unidentifiable nations carry on their bombastic crap). Sometimes she laughs and says that actually it does not matter where she lives: ‘denn vor den Menschen kann ich mich überall fürchten’ (p. 89; because I can be afraid of human beings anywhere). She delivers a pessimistic verdict on her own century: ‘Seit diesem Frühjahr, in welchem die Unheilbarkeit dieses Jahrhunderts sichtbar geworden ist [...]’ (p. 91; Since the start of this year, when it became evident that this century is incurable [...]).

Kirsch recalls the German painter Heinrich Vogeler (1872-1942) who moved to Soviet Union in 1931. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, he was deported to a camp (as an enemy alien) and died in 1942. In the narrator’s view, it seems inexplicable that people should expect a miracle to come from the land where Heinrich Vogeler died (p. 88) (of course Vogeler was not the only one who died in the USSR around this time - in the second half of 1941 alone, eight million people died as a result of Operation Barbarossa). The narrator alludes to the Chernobyl disaster: ‘das schwarze Frühjahr, von dem alles gezeichnet nun war [...]’ (p. 88) (the black spring, which everything was marked by [...]).

Towards the end of the text, the narrator reflects on humanity’s ability to destroy itself and the planet Earth. She comments that if the end of the world happens not because of the cosmos burning or freezing, but because of human beings themselves (if the earth is destroyed by its own creatures), then this would be both more rational and more absurd (p. 108). Yet the narrator rejects what she calls ‘Die feige Flucht in die sanften Utopien’ (p. 108; The cowardly flight into gentle utopias). Instead, she quotes the first line of the famous poem ‘Abend’ (Evening) by the baroque poet Andreas Gryphius, which reflects on human mortality: ‘Der schnelle Tag ist hin | die Nacht schwingt ihre Fahn’ (The quick day is gone | Night swings its banner).

English Translations

Sarah Kirsch, Winter Music: Selected Poems, trans. Margitt Lehbert (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1994)

Sarah Kirsch, T, trans. by Wendy Mulford and Anthony Vivis (London: Reality Street Editions, 1995)

Sarah Kirsch, Ice Roses: Selected Poems, trans. by Anne Stokes (Manchester: Carcanet, 2014)