This study of contemporary German poetry represents the first comprehensive examination of lyric responses to the unification period. It demonstrates, by means of close textual analysis, how the political Wende was also a literary turning-point, and it assesses diverse ways in which GDR poets wrote the revolutionary events of 1989 as well as their first lyric responses to newly united Germany. Two central chapters investigate the poetry of the Wende and unification as a corpus of work in which recurring themes, motifs and techniques point to poetry’s function as a witness to otherwise marginalized aspects of history. The volume sets post-1989 reassessments against the background of literary production and reception in the GDR (between 1949 and 1989) and argues that poetry from the Berlin Republic articulates a crisis in ex-GDR poets’ understanding of their role. After identifying broad trends across a wide range of individual poems, collections and anthologies, single chapters analyse in greater depth the post-Wende work of Volker Braun and Durs Grünbein as two contrasting types of lyric response to unification. A concluding chapter addresses the issue of a separate GDR literature in view of the perpetuation of GDR identity in poetry after 1990.

This book is on the reading list for the undergraduate course Ge13: Aspects of German-speaking Europe after 1945, at the University of Cambridge.