Experience and reflection: On the loss of life of the critic Wolfgang Werth | EUROtoday

When he was awarded the “Frankfurt Anthology Prize” in May 2000, Wolfgang Werth appeared astonished. However, there was not a grain of flirtatiousness in his acceptance speech, however slightly a radical questioning of himself.

How can or not it’s, he requested in his acceptance speech, that somebody who, as he himself clearly acknowledges, is solely “too slow” to overview volumes of poetry receives a prize that honors productive engagement with poetry as a part of the Frankfurt anthology based by Marcel Reich-Ranicki and continued weekly to this present day? “Because even if poems jump out at me or if I respond to them directly,” the prize winner writes: “I need time to find out what is happening between them and me.” This additionally utilized to the conversations with him, which have been so particular and priceless exactly as a result of, regardless of all his spontaneous friendliness and attentiveness, he thought fastidiously earlier than answering. In doing so, he enriched each jury he was a member of, together with the SWR finest listing and the Darmstadt “Book of the Month” jury.

So what occurs there between expertise and subsequent reflection? Werth, born in 1937 in Rudolstadt, Thuringia, skilled early on the overwhelming feeling that may come from poetry, from hymns like Paul Gerhardt’s “Geh aus, mein Herz”, which opened up the encompassing nature and its seasons in a very new option to the nine-year-old baby, who now lives in Waldeck. Brought again to Thuringia by his father in 1949, it was Heine’s “Germany. A Winter’s Tale” that woke up within the younger particular person the concept his personal studying could be opposite to the studying prescribed within the instructional system of the early GDR – what you might be presenting is meant to be Heine?

The incontrovertible fact that he fled in 1956, not but of authorized age, and started learning literature in West Berlin, with Goethe’s poems and 5 volumes of Heine in his cardboard suitcase, was solely logical and had as a lot to do along with his inherent spirit of contradiction as along with his love of literature and conversations about it. He studied German, Romance languages ​​and journalism and have become an editor, together with for the journal “Der Monat” till 1968.

Werth labored as a contract critic and joined the options division of the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” in 1973. Six years later he turned its literary director. He traveled so much and found the great thing about the North Atlantic for himself when he looked for the areas of the sagas in Iceland and for puffins and Odin’s chickens within the Faroe Islands. And he continued to domesticate what he known as his “inner anthology,” crammed with “poems and verses that literally hit me when I needed them—and so they stayed and never left.”

Luckily for us: He shared his ideas on a few of them in his intelligent, enlightening, opinionated contributions within the “Frankfurt Anthology”, for instance on Johann Heinrich Voß’ “The Potato Harvest”, Walter von der Vogelweide’s “Ich hân mîn lêhen”, Günter Grass’ “Kinderlied” or Thomas Brasch’s legacy poem “Shut the Door”. His texts present that the ready time was nicely spent past the every day information. The Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts awarded him the “Hausenstein” honor for his contributions to cultural training. Wolfgang Werth has now died on the age of 88.