The Emprise of Poetry: Durs Grnbein, America, Antisemitism, and the Pursuit of Liberty

(Hardback)

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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 Grnbein (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 Grnbein, the most widely translated and globally honored living German poet, and the only one to have been hailed as the Berlin Republics most qualified contemporary candidate for the office of German national poet. Yet as Eskin outlines, Grnbeins work contains a paradoxical and tension-filled twofold self-construction: as an idiosyncratically American poet and Ezra Pounds 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 cultures persisting inability to purge itself of ideological toxins that leach into the mainstream from centuries-old prejudices and antagonisms revolving around Germanys love-hate bond with America as well as its ostensibly enduring suspicion and antipathy toward Jews. Eskins deep dive into the American Grnbeins apparent philosemitism coupled with the German Grnbeins antisemitically-inflected anti-Americanism reveals the fault lines underlying the complex and contradictory legacies and contexts of postwar German culture.

Author Bio

Michael Eskin has taught at Cambridge University, 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, Mandelshtam, and Celan (2000), Poetic Affairs: Celan, Grnbein, Brodsky (2008), and Descartes der Metapher: Neun Tauchgnge ins Dichterdasein Durs Grnbeins (2022).