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high praise for a work called "Felder"
(Areas)
;
last year he was censured
sharply for presenting a fashionable pop-text. The prose read at the
Pulvermiihle was regarded as a continuation of "Areas," only much
improved technically, and with a broader, no longer provincial, scope.
Becker has just returned from a two-year fellowship stay in Rome.
As
his titles indicate, Becker works in abstract fields (or as Enzens–
berger called them, "magnetic fields"), removing colloquial expressions,
slogans, small talk, from their context, and arranging them in such a
way as to show how they cancel each other out, how they are ultimately
absurd. Grass described this technique as "Benennung-Aufhebung Dialek–
tik" (designate-revoke). Someone else called Becker's protocol of con–
sciousness "Bewusstseins-Realismus," and so, if nothing else, the terms
for new tendencies, the arrows for new directions (add to these Lettau's
"Mutmassung-Stil") were provided at this session.
Humor still seems to be suspect in the high courts of German litera–
ture. That this is so could be seen in the reaction to the short prose
pieces read by Gunter Eich. Eich's last volume of poetry, "Anlasse und
Steingarten," came out about a year ago, just as Eich turned sixty.
Over the years the poet's progress has been marked by an agonized
struggle to "wring speech out of silence." What a surprise then to find
Eich jesting, indulging in what were termed "private jokes," dancing a
jig in his own mausoleum! Readers of his last volume, as well as "Drei
Prosastiicke," printed in
Die Neue Rundschau,
Winter, 1966, should be
less astonished.
Resignation was never a pose with Eich. Why shouldn't he cast it
off, or rather, cast it aside temporarily; particularly, one might add,
when it has become so fashionable? "I have never," writes the father
of the
Kahlschlag
poetry, "been avant-garde. I have always moved
sideways."
Group 47 is constantly under attack for lacking political courage,
for already belonging to the Establishment (which Establishment?), as
well as for all the opposite reasons. During one of the afternoon sessions,
the Pulvermuhle was approached by a crowd of hippie students (some
of them drove up in their brand-new Jaguars) from the SDS (Students
for Social Democracy) of Erlangen University. They shouted and
flaunted banners, lambasting the Group for failing to take action against
the Springer Concern, Germany's Hearst mammoth that controls more
than one-third of the country's press. Little did they know that in the
early hours of that same morning a resolution had been drawn up,
pledging the undersigned to desist from contributing to Springer papers,
and appealing to members of PEN as well as
to
independent writers and
scholars all over the country to follow suit.
