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The Emprise of Poetry analyzes the insidious entwinement of anti-Americanism and antisemitism in modern and contemporary German culture through the writings of one of its most acclaimed literary figures: Dresden native Durs Grunbein (1962-). Michael Eskin offers an unprecedented view of the American- cum -Jewish discontents at the heart of modern and present-day German culture through the exemplary lens of the work of Durs Grunbein, the most widely translated and globally honored living German poet, and the only one to have been hailed as the Berlin Republic''s "most qualified contemporary candidate for the office of German national poet." Yet as Eskin outlines, Grunbein''s work contains a paradoxical and tension-filled twofold self-construction: as an idiosyncratically '' American '' poet and Ezra Pound''s vociferously philosemitic heir, who merely happens to be writing in German, as it were, conjoined with an avidly anti-American German poet who writes emphatically, and not always savorily, as a German and a self-proclaimed heir to the legacies of Celan and Kafka - most notably, on matters American and Jewish. Against the foil of these tensions, Eskin traces and documents postwar German high culture''s persisting inability to purge itself of ideological toxins that leach into the mainstream from centuries-old prejudices and antagonisms revolving around Germany''s love-hate bond with America as well as its ostensibly enduring suspicion and antipathy toward Jews. Eskin''s deep dive into the '' American '' Grunbein''s apparent philosemitism coupled with the German Grunbein''s antisemitically-inflected anti-Americanism reveals the fault lines underlying the complex and contradictory legacies and contexts of postwar German culture.
List of contents
Prefatory Note
Introduction: A Brief Discourse (Mostly) on Method
1. On a Difficult Book to Write, Literary Facts, and Grünbein's America
2. The Greatest American Poet of the German Language
3. Coming of Age as an American Poet in Germany
4. "Jews, Real Jews"
5. Writing America as a
German Poet
6. The
German Grünbein's
German America
7. The End of the Affair
Epilogue
AcknowledgmentsBibliographyIndex
About the author
Michael Eskin has taught at University of Cambridge, UK and Columbia University, USA. He is a critic, translator, philosopher and publisher, and his books include Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel’shtam, and Celan (2000), Poetic Affairs: Celan, Grünbein, Brodsky (2008), The DNA of Prejudice: On the One and the Many (2010), Descartes der Metapher: Neun Tauchgänge ins Dichterdasein Durs Grünbeins (2022), and Childhood: An Essay on the Human Condition (2024).
