Günter Eich

Eich, Günter (Lebus/Oder, 1907-72, Salzburg), while studying Chinese and economics at the universities of Leipzig, Berlin, and the Sorbonne, contributed (under the pseudonym Erich Günter) to the Anthologie jüngster Lyrik (1927) by W. Fehse and K. Mann. In 1929 he wrote jointly with M. Raschke a radio play (on Caruso), and in 1930 published his first volume of poetry, Gedichte, reflecting the influence of O. Loerke and W. Lehmann. Having established contact with other writers, among them P. Huchel and H. Kasack, he terminated his studies and in 1933 settled as a freelance writer in Berlin. During the following years his activities involved compromises with National Socialist cultural policy, from which he sought to distance himself towards the mid-1930s. Between 1935 and 1945 he wrote virtually no poetry, but turned out a vast number of scripts for the radio on which he depended for a living. Called up in 1939, he served until 1945, when he became a US prisoner of war. In 1946 he settled in Bavaria, but in the early 1960s he made his home in Austria (nr. Salzburg), having married Ilse Aichinger in 1953. He collaborated with Der Ruf and became a founder member of Gruppe 47, receiving its prize in 1950 for his radio play Geh nicht nach El Kuwehd! (1950; 1953). He helped to found Akzente, and in 1959, at the end of the most effective decade of his life, not least as the leading author of innovative radio plays (see Hörspiel), he was awarded the Büchner Prize.

Eich's first significant collection, Abgelegene Gehöfte (1948), established him as one of the reformers showing the way out of the crisis in lyric poetry following the National Socialist period, notably in his dry, matter-of-fact prisoner-of-war poems, of which ‘Inventur’ became best known for exemplifying the radical ‘clean sweep’ (see Kahlschlag) of language. The greater substance of his poetry, however, gradually grew out of his romantic approach to nature, on which his new attempt to decipher ‘reality’ is based. By listening to the inaudible voices of nature, Eich sought to comprehend ‘the world as language’ (die Welt als Sprache), seeing himself as the unwitting translator (Übersetzer=translatio and transgressio) of an original text (Urtext). By this he implied his endeavour to advance from the threshold of existence into the metaphysical sphere in order to translate objects into meaning; he defined them as mere ‘trigonometrical points’ or buoys yielding a sense of orientation. As such they inform the structure of his poetry, and in ‘Der große Lübbe-See’, read to Gruppe 47 in 1950, are directly integrated into it. However, the sense of void, fear, and disillusionment expressed in this poem adumbrates most of the verse he wrote during this phase, which includes Untergrundbahn (1949) and, notably, the collection Botschaften des Regens (1955).

In his radio plays Eich made imaginative use of sound effects, filling the space beyond concrete reality with dreams and dreamlike states, in which his figures attain self-knowledge and acquaintance with death and sacrifice (with or without transcendental relevance). In Träume (1950), he uses a cycle of five dreams (the controversial second dream was later withdrawn) to denounce the society of the ‘economic miracle’ (Wirtschaftswunder). It ends with the frequently quoted lines urging resistance against the machinations of power: ‘Seid unbequem, seid Sand, nicht das Öl im Getriebe der Welt!’ In Die Andere und ich (1952) a woman typifying that society has a dream that changes her attitude to life. Like most of Eich's plays, it derives its full effect from the combination of two strands of action and two levels of time, and from a consciousness of contrasting realities. In all Eich wrote almost 30 radio plays of varying complexity, Die Mädchen aus Viterbo (1953, publ. 1958) being one of the best known.

Zu den Akten (1964), a collection of poetry, forms a transition to the final collections, Ablässe und Steingärten (1966) and Nach Seumes Papieren (1972), which, like the last radio play, Zeit und Kartoffeln (1972), focuses on J. G. Seume. Nothing showed the breakdown of Eich's world more than the sharp irony of his ‘prose poetry’ Maulwürfe (1968) and Ein Tibeter in meinem Büro. 49 Maulwürfe (1970). Increasingly sceptical of literature, including his own, Eich had become a ‘negative writer’, turning his ‘anarchic instinct’, to which he confessed in his crucial Büchner Prize speech of 1959, against all principles of coherent communication. Other works include the story Katharine (1936), the short stories Züge im Nebel (1947), Der Stelzengänger (1954), and two puppet plays (Marionettenspiele), Unter Wasser and Böhmische Schneider (1964). He wrote the postscript to the radio play Herrn Walsers Raben (1960) by his friend W. Hildesheimer and published an edition of poetry by Oskar Loerke. Gesammelte Werke (4 vols.), ed. S. Müller-Hanpft and I. Aichinger, appeared in 1973 and Gesammelte Werke (4 vols.), ed. A. Vieregg and K. H. Karst, in 1991.

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