Volker Braun is a political poet with distinct aesthetic qualities, whose significance in writing spans all genres. His extensive oeuvre, though multifaceted, centers on the question of political emancipation. Within the GDR, he critiqued the path of "real socialism" but never abandoned hope for a better future, achievable partly through literature. Braun's poetry often identifies with an unrealized possibility, where the discrepancy between utopia and reality is expressed within the language itself, marked by internal tension and dialectical relationships.
Volker Braun's verses explore the unresolved issues stemming from Europe's colonial past and its impact on contemporary democracies. Translated into English by the talented poet Ann Cotten, the work highlights that the themes of looted art and state theft are global rather than national phenomena, emphasizing the international language of justice.
Great Fugue is Volker Braun's most recent collection, an attempt to understand the strange, silent world of 2020 and the COVID pandemic. Drawing on Dante, Beethoven and Pound, the book examines the catastrophic conflict between Progress and Nature in the Anthropocene Age. A book about the day the world stood still in 2020, when our cities were sedated, the streets fell silent and Nature refused to submit to human ideas of Progress. In the Anthropocene era, the Mekong no longer finds its delta, fires burn in the dry forests, and the seas and the skies are fatally poisoned. German writer Volker Braun tries to measure a world caught between climate emergency and global instability, economic growth and social decay.
Rubble Flora: Selected Poems introduces a major German poet to the English-speaking world. This selection of poems by Volker Braun spans an extraordinary half-century of poetry (1963–2013). Born in the former East Germany, Braun is a humane, witty, brave and disappointed poet. In the East, his poetry upheld the voice of the individual imagination and identified with a utopian possibility that never became reality. He might be said to have found a truly singular voice amid the colossal upheavals of 1989: exploring the triumph of capitalism and the languages of advertising, terror, politics and war. At the same time, he is a sensual poet in tune with the natural landscape. Like most writers, he has his own touchstones in world literature, and many of his poems set quotations from Rimbaud, Shakespeare and Brecht into his own context, where they work as ironic illuminations of a present plight. The literary principle of his work lies in the friction of these different voices, whether cast into free form, collage or classical verse. Cumulatively, his poems offer a searing vision of the here and now.
Nach dem Fall der Mauer stürzte die Dresdner Stadtregierung ihr Lenin-Denkmal und vermachte es einem schwäbischen Steinmetz. Rudolf Herz schloss im Sommer 2004 mit dem neuen Eigentümer einen Leihvertrag, stellte die monumentalen Torsi von Lenin und zwei anonymen Genossen auf einen Sattelzug und durchquerte vier Wochen lang Mitteleuropa. Abends machte das Gefährt Station vor einem Theater, einem Museum oder auf einem Stadtplatz, wo Künstler, Kulturforscher, Soziologen und Publizisten zu Ansprachen aufgefordert wurden: 'Erklären Sie Lenin das 21. Jahrhundert!' Begleitet wurde die Tour von einem Filmteam und den Fotografen Reinhard Matz und Irena Wunsch. Aus den aufwendig inszenierten Bildern entstanden zusammen mit den Statements der prominenten und namenlosen Zeitgenossen ein Film, eine Ausstellung und dieses umfangreiche Künstlerbuch. Rudolf Herz, geboren 1954 Sonthofen, entwickelt seit längerer Zeit Konzeptionen, die sich mit Fragen der Denkmalssetzung und -zerstörung beschäftigen. Der vielfach ausgestellte und ausgezeichnete Künstler (u. a. Stipendiat in der Villa Massimo, Preisträger im Wettbewerb zum Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas) lebt in München und Paris.