Born: Tilsit, East Prussia (now Sovetsk, Russia); April 9, 1917
Died: East Berlin, East Germany (now Berlin, Germany); September 2, 1965
PRINCIPAL POETRY
Sarmatische Zeit, 1961
Schattenland Ströme, 1962
Shadow Land: Selected Poems, 1966
Wetterzeichen, 1966
Im Windgesträuch, 1970
The White Mirror, 1993
OTHER LITERARY FORMS
Although Johannes Bobrowski (bawd-ROW-skee) is remembered primarily for his poetry, he did publish two critically acclaimed experimental novels: Levins Mühle: 34 Sätze über meinen Grossvater (1964; Levin’s Mill: Thirty-four Statements About My Grandfather, 1970) and Litauische Klaviere (1966; Lithuanian pianos). He also wrote several short stories, which are collected in the following volumes: Boehlendorff, und andere Erzählungen (1965; Boehlendorff, and other stories), Mäusefest, und andere Erzählungen (1965; festival of the mice, and other stories), and Der Mahner (1967; I Taste Bitterness, 1970). Working as a reader at an East German publishing house, he had the opportunity to edit books by others, including collections of legends and poetry. Recordings of several of his poems are available.
ACHIEVEMENTS
Johannes Bobrowski belonged to that generation of East German poets who matured late artistically, since their creative development was interrupted by the events of World War II and the founding of a new state. When Bobrowski finally published his first slender volumes in the early 1960’s, they caused a great deal of excitement in both East and West Germany, for he was recognized as a major talent. His thematic concerns were new and provocative, and his unique style, based in part on classical German modes yet stripped to the bare linguistic essentials, was rich in metaphor and allegory. For his poetic accomplishments, he was awarded the prestigious prize of the Group 47 in 1962, a prize given only to the most promising new authors in the German-speaking world. In the same year, he won the Alma-Johanna-Koenig Prize in Vienna. For his novel Levin’s Mill, he was awarded the Heinrich Mann Prize of the East Berlin Academy of the Arts and the international Charles Veillon Prize from Switzerland, both in 1965. He was posthumously granted the East German F. C. Weiskopf Prize in 1967.
Together with Erich Arendt and Peter Huchel, Bobrowski is credited with giving a new direction and inspiration to East German poetry, which until his time was bogged down in the principles of Socialist Realism and the Brechtian tradition. Bobrowski showed his own generation and younger, emerging poets that artistic integrity and genuine creativity and diversity were possible within the framework of a socialist state. He also called attention to the great classical German heritage, which had been largely forgotten in the postwar years, and to the most recent developments in West German and foreign poetry. About ten years later, in the early 1970’s, his name was again invoked by younger authors in East Germany who sought a new means of aesthetic expression. Although Bobrowski was notably absent from literary anthologies and histories in East Germany immediately after his death, he later was given a place of honor in the literary canon there and is recognized as a humanitarian author who strove for socialist ideals. In West Germany, more emphasis is placed on an appreciation of his style. He is often mentioned in connection with Günter Eich and Paul Celan, who, like Bobrowski, employed a reduced and concentrated lexical inventory, to the point of being hermetic or even opaque, and who at the same time did not shy away from combining mythological elements with autobiographical and contemporary references.
BIOGRAPHY
Johannes Bobrowski was born in a German town in East Prussia, not far from Lithuania; his father was a German railroad employee of Polish descent. Bobrowski spent his childhood in the small village of Mozischken and frequently visited his grandparents on their farm in the country. It was at this time that he learned much about the culture and history of the Slavic peoples who lived across the border. In 1928, the family moved to Königsberg (later called Kaliningrad), where Bobrowski attended a college-preparatory high school. In school, he was particularly attracted to the disciplines of music and painting; one of his teachers there was the writer Ernst Wiechert. In 1937, the family moved again, this time to Berlin, where Bobrowski began to study art history.
In 1939, Bobrowski was conscripted into military service. During World War II, he served as a soldier in France, Poland, and northern Russia, but he was also a member of the Bekennende Kirche (the Confessing Church), a Protestant resistance group. He was taken prisoner of war in 1945 and remained in Russian captivity until 1949; he was held in the regions of the Don and middle Volga Rivers and did forced labor as a coal miner. He returned to East Berlin in 1949, and in 1950, he began working as a reader at the publishing house Union Verlag, affiliated with the Lutheran Church. He remained there until his death, resulting from complications after an appendicitis operation, in 1965.
Bobrowski began writing poetry in 1941, when he was stationed at Lake Ilmen, and a few of his poems were published in the “inner emigration” magazine Das innere Reich. He did not write much again until the early 1950’s. His first poems after the war appeared in 1954 in the East German literary magazine Sinn und Form, which was edited by his friend Peter Huchel. Bobrowski continued to write sporadically after this literary debut, but he did not feel that his style had matured sufficiently until the early 1960’s, when he published his first two volumes of poetry. He completed work on Wetterzeichen (signs of the weather), but it did not appear until after his death. Im Windgesträuch (in the wind bushes), appeared in 1970, containing poems of lesser quality which were written between 1953 and 1964.
ANALYSIS
Many of Johannes Bobrowski’s poems, as he often stated, have as their central theme the relationship between the Germans and their neighbors to the East, the Slavic peoples. Because he grew up along the river Memel, where these two cultures merge, Bobrowski was particularly sensitive to this issue. From the days of the Order of the Teutonic Knights in the Middle Ages, the Germans had treated these people very badly, and the history of their relations is marred by war, repression, and murder. Bobrowski the poet recalls these atrocities, lest contemporary Germans forget to atone for their past misdeeds.
SARMATIA POEMS
To accomplish this goal, Bobrowski uses the concept of Sarmatia, a vague term applied by ancient historians and geographers to the area that he has in mind—namely, the territory between Finland and southern Russia from the Baltic to the Black Sea. He populates his Sarmatia with a host of various personages: ancient gods, legendary figures, and historical personalities. Bobrowski thus creates a mythology of sorts to come to terms with the German past, but it is not a well-defined mythology, and one can discern its full richness only by studying his poems as a totality.
Thus, when one reads about the ancient gods Perkun and Pikoll in “Pruzzische Elegie” (“Prussian Elegy”), about the great Lithuanian ruler Wilna in “Anruf” (“Appeal”) or in “Wilna,” about the legendary sunken city of Kiteshgorod in “Erzählung” (“Story”), or about Russian writer Isaac Babel in “Holunderblüte” (“Elderblossom”), one confronts only one aspect of Bobrowski’s poetic world. History is treated as myth and myth as history. The reader must be willing to mingle and combine past and present, the real and the fictional, to form a coherent concept of the historical development Bobrowski has in mind.
LAYERS OF HISTORY
This historical dimension of Bobrowski’s poetry offers a key to understanding his works. His poems contain five intertwined temporal layers: ancient times, in which the Slavic or Sarmatian tribes were free to determine their own existence and live in close harmony with nature; past centuries of conflict with the German invaders; the horrors of World War II, which Bobrowski had personally experienced; the present time, in which one must rectify old wrongs; and a future era, in which all men will live in communion with one another. It is often difficult to separate these layers, particularly when the reader finds many confusing temporal references within a single poem, yet this very ambiguity accounts for the richness of Bobrowski’s verse; the various layers illuminate one another and promote an understanding of historical and cultural processes.
Moreover, these poems transcend their historical occasion, offering profound general insights into man’s inhumanity to man on a global scale and forcefully arguing the need for reconciliation and the end of barbarism. They can thus be read and appreciated by people from various cultural backgrounds and different eras. This rich philosophical content of the poems also explains how Bobrowski, as a Christian non-Marxist, was able to survive and publish in East Germany. He was seen as a seer or prophet who pointed out the errors of the past and the way to achieve the future brotherhood of all men—one of the proclaimed goals of the communist state. In a manner similar to the historical process he was describing, Bobrowski’s poetry underwent a noticeable thematic development or progression: His first poems are concerned primarily with the fantastic landscape of Sarmatia; later poems include historical events and persons from the recent and distant past; and finally, Bobrowski arrives at a discussion of the problems of contemporary Berlin.
HONOR AND REMEMBRANCE
Not all Bobrowski poems deal with Sarmatia. A few treat the themes of love and death, not with any specificity, but in general philosophical terms. Two other categories, however, must be discussed in greater detail. The first contains poems written in honor or in memory of other artists with whom Bobrowski feels some affinity, such as François Villon, Joseph Conrad, Dylan Thomas, Marc Chagall, Johann Georg Hamann, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Gertrud Kolmar, Friedrich Hölderlin, Else Lasker-Schüler, Nelly Sachs, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johann Sebastian Bach, Christian Domelaitis, and Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. These “portrait poems” are not biographical or artistic summaries, but rather impressions of the artists or their lives. Bobrowski merely takes one aspect or feature of the artist and explains why he admires it or considers it important for his work. Thus, in the poem “An Klopstock” (“To Klopstock”), Bobrowski praises Klopstock’s notion that one must recall the past and atone for former transgressions. (Bobrowski considered Klopstock to be his “taskmaster,” both stylistically and thematically.) In “Hamann,” he praises the eighteenth century poet for collecting and preserving ancient tales and legends. (Bobrowski was greatly influenced by Hamann while still in school and felt that Hamann’s life’s goals were similar to his own. He had been collecting material for years for a monograph on Hamann but was unable to complete it because of his premature death.) In the poems “Else Lasker-Schüler” and “An Nelly Sachs” (“To Nelly Sachs”), Bobrowski points to the suffering these poets endured because they were Jewish, a suffering similar to that of the Jews living in Sarmatia. Bobrowski shared with all these artists a deep humanistic commitment to others and a concern for suffering in the world.
“ALWAYS TO BE NAMED” AND “LANGUAGE”
Another significant category of Bobrowski’s poems, though by no means large, could be termed metapoetry. In these poems, Bobrowski describes his concept of poetic language and poetic communication. Two of these poems are especially paradigmatic: “Immer zu benennen” (“Always to Be Named”) and “Sprache” (“Language”). Here, Bobrowski shows that he believes in an almost mystical relationship between the word and the thing named, that the word somehow captures the spirit of the thing or the person to which it refers. This idea plays an important role in Bobrowski’s mythology, for objects, particularly from nature, take on a new significance: They become part of humans, part of their past and their relationships to others. Thus, to advance into the future, not only history but also words and nature are important, as words and nature enable people to communicate with one another and prepare themselves for what is to come. This is for Bobrowski the highest sense of poetry—it speaks to readers on several levels and raises their degree of consciousness. Poetry does not, Bobrowski claims, move the reader to bold political or social acts.
NATURE AS SYMBOL
Because of his emphasis on humanity’s relationship to nature through language, and because he believed that humanity’s harmony with nature, which was somehow lost in the past, must be regained to save the human race, Bobrowski’s work has often been referred to as nature poetry. This description is valid only to a certain extent. It is true that Bobrowski does employ a great number of recurring nature motifs in his poetry, most frequently rivers, birds, trees, fish, stones, wolves, light, and darkness. These motifs, however, are not an evocation of nature per se. They do not merely conjure up the beauty of landscapes to be admired and enjoyed, but rather they function as symbols within the overriding thematics of the poem. Although they have varying connotations, Bobrowski generally uses these motifs to connect human beings to nature and to show how humans are part of the natural historical process. The objects of nature remain constant throughout historical change, says Bobrowski, and so, too, does the human soul. If people can rid themselves of the barbarous acts of war and violence and return to their primeval natural state, they will have reached their ultimate goal. This strong concern for the human and communal element is what sets Bobrowski’s poems apart from traditional nature poetry.
POETIC MINIMALISM
Bobrowski’s symbolic treatment of nature is only one aspect of his laconic style. The most striking feature of his poetry is the reduction of the linguistic material to an extreme minimum. Frequently, lines consist of merely a word or two each, and the length of the line is very irregular. Bobrowski often employs sentence fragments consisting of a single word, and longer syntactic units are usually broken up into several lines, interrupting the semantic flow.
The breaking of the poem into small phrases gives primacy to the individual word and lends the poetic message an aspect far different from what it would possesswere it written in prose or even conventional poetic style. The free rhythms are sometimes fairly regular, so that the reader is often reminded of the odes and elegies of previous centuries. Bobrowski’s concentrated and abbreviated style demands the active participation of the reader, who must fill in the missing material and make the appropriate associations and connections, a process similar to that through which one tries to remember events of the distant past. Such a difficult procedure tends at times to weaken the thematic impact of the poem, but as Fritz Minde points out in an article on Bobrowski, the poems can indeed be decoded with the help of published biographical and historical material; their difficult construction mimics the deformed and incoherent structure of reality.
STRUCTURE
In Poetry in East Germany (1971), John Flores suggests a method by which this decoding can be performed. He believes that most of Bobrowski’s poems have three parts or stages. In the first, or introductory, part, the author relies chiefly on nouns, employed in an uncertain, staccato fashion. He is setting the mood for the poem by using the naming process described above. The reader is uncertain and somewhat confused. In the second stage, spatial and temporal connections begin to appear. The style is more reflective and narrative, and nouns are linked with verbs. The thematic thrust of the poem begins to take shape. In the final stage, the staccato mode is reintroduced, but here the verb prevails. The author unleashes his thoughts and ideas in a torrent of words. These thoughts have been building in intensity throughout the poem, and they all come together in the end in a desperate cry for recognition.
LEGACY
The difficult and cryptic nature of many of Bobrowski’s poems raises the question of his place in literary history. Was he a true member of the avant-garde, a forerunner of or participant in the reductive “linguistic” movement of contemporary German poetry? No, he did not use language as a collection of building blocks devoid of meaning. Instead, he can be seen as part of the movement toward radical reduction of language that began around 1910 with the expressionists in Germany and that insisted on a language free of all Decadent cultural encrustations. Such a purification of language became all the more necessary after the abuses of the Nazi years. At the same time, however, Bobrowski went beyond this essentially negative program, offering in his verse substantive arguments in favor of a new and better world.
OTHER MAJOR WORKS
LONG FICTION: Levins Mühle: 34 Sätze über meinen Grossvater, 1964 (Levin’s Mill: Thirty-four Statements About My Grandfather, 1970); Litauische Klaviere, 1966.
SHORT FICTION: Boehlendorff, und andere Erzählungen, 1965; Mäusefest, und andere Erzählungen, 1965; Der Mahner, 1967 (I Taste Bitterness, 1970).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bridgwater, Patrick. “The Poetry of Johannes Bobrowski.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 2 (1966): 320-334. A critical study of Bobrowski’s poetic works.
Flores, John. Poetry in East Germany: Adjustments, Visions, and Provocations, 1945-1970. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971. A history and critical analysis of poetry in postwar East Germany including the works of Bobrowski during this period. Includes bibliographic references.
Glenn, Jerry. “An Introduction to the Poetry of Johannes Bobrowski.” Germanic Review 41 (1966): 45-56. A brief critical assessment of Bobrowski’s poetic works.
Keith-Smith, Brian. Johannes Bobrowski. London: Wolff, 1970. Introductory biography with selected poetry and prose in English translation. Includes bibliography.
O’Doherty, Paul. The Portrayal of Jews in GDR Prose Fiction. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997. Contains a short section on Bobrowski’s depiction of Jews in his prose work. While it does not discuss the poetry, it does shed light on who Bobrowski was and the times in which he lived.
Scrase, David. Understanding Johannes Bobrowski. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995 . Critical interpretation and brief biography by a specialist in German and Austrian art and literature. Includes bibliography.
Wieczorek, John P. Between Sarmatia and Socialism: The Life and Works of Johannes Bobrowski. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999. Examines the chronological development of Bobrowski’s Sarmatian works and places them within the context of a biography of his career.
Robert Acker