Twentieth-Century German Poetry: An Anthology

This groundbreaking anthology will serve as the standard for years to come. Editor Michael Hofmann has assembled brilliant translations of the major German poets from Rilke and Brecht to Durs Grunbein and Jan Wagner in an approachable readable and endlessly interesting collection. Here we find poetry as a living counter-force to socio-political reality; poetry of dissent and fear and protest; poetry of private griefs and musics. From the subtlety and elegance of Brecht to the extraordinary jargon-glooms of Gottfried Benn to the oblique and straightforward responses to the countrys villainous history to the bitter cleansed and haunted poetry of the postwar years the anthology ends with a reunified country looking at itself and its neighbors in new ways. This is an essential and timely collection of verse from a tumultuous violent tragic and hopeful century written in the language of those who were at the heart of the matter.