Günter Eich

Günter Eich /ʼɡyntɐ ɑɪç/ (February 1 1907 - December 20 1972) was a German lyricist, dramatist, and author. He was born in Lebus, on the Oder River, and educated in Leipzig, Berlin, and Paris.

After being held as a prisoner of war, he was one of the founders in 1947 of Gruppe 47, and for poems in his then unpublished Abgelegene Gehöfte, he was one of the first two recipients, in 1950, of its Literature Prize for young writers.

He published prose, poetry, and radio plays over the rest of his life. In 1953, he married the Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger. They lived in Germany, but he died in Salzburg.

His collected works were published in four volumes in 1991.

James Dickey opened his 1965 poem "The Firebombing," about a nighttime air raid on the Japanese town of Beppu, with this epigraph from Eich's work:

Denke daran, dass nach den großen Zerstörungen

Jedermann beweisen wird, dass er unschuldig war.

roughly:

Think of this: that after the great destructions

every man will attest that he was innocent.

Output Before the Third Reich

Eich was an important contributor to Die Kolonne, a literary magazine. This constitutes an invaluable resource of his work prior to the Machtergreifung Die Kolonne is seen as a reaction against contemporary Modernist literary trends, and rests on three central principles, ‘the essential timelessness of the inner life, the notion of the genius as representative of his age, and the religious function of art.' Eich believed in a fundamental incompatibility between poetry and politics and in his essay, Bemerkungen über Lyrik, he drew a line between the poet 'als Lyriker' and 'als Privatmann' which allows a poet to be politically active as long as it does not impinge on their work.

Eich is regarded as being a literary conservative and his public association with a staunchly critical review of Johannes R. Becher's poem, Der Große Plan attests to this. Indeed ‘The most fitting overall characterisation of [Die Kolonne] would not be liberal or progressive, but conservative.’ Die Kolonne was strongly representative of Eich’s own aesthetic and ideological views, and although largely apolitical, it appeared to favour conservatism in terms of ideology. Despite this apparent conservatism, the journal aimed to separate literature from any political influence.

Output During the Third Reich

The majority of Eich's literary output in this period were radio plays, these numbered 160. The most famous of these today is Rebellion in der Goldstadt which was only recently discovered. The play was broadcast on the 8th of May 1940 in an anti-British radio campaign the Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry was waging. It deals with a South African mine and its workers striking against the poor wages they receive from the overtly-capitalist British owner, Lord Pembroke. There is some contention surrounding Eich's complete authorship of the play as there is no broadcast text in his handwriting. Furthermore, Scene '1a' seems to be a late addition to the play, and takes on an overtly stronger anti-capitalist/British sentiment.

Response to the Machtergreifung

After the war Eich made many public statements about the role of artists in standing up against oppressive regimes, 'If our work cannot be understood as criticism, as opposition and resistance [. . .] then we are positive and decorate the slaughterhouse with geraniums' and 'Seid unbequem, seid Sand, nicht das Öl im Getriebe der Welt!' Which translates as 'Be inconvenient, be sand, not oil in the gears of the world'.

These statements, however, stand in stark difference to his actions during the Third Reich. His radio plays were often tailored to fit the propagandistic needs of the Nazi party, extolling Blut und Boden rural life and denouncing the decadent capitalism of the regimes enemies. It is believed that Eich had pragmatic reasons for writing all of his radio plays:

'Eichs Rundfunktätigkeit beschränkte sich auf den Hörspielbereich und diente dem Broterwerb. [. . .] Wie viele Hörspiele, Märchenbearbeitungen, Kalenderblätter Eich auch schrieb, niemals hat er damit «Karriere« gemacht.'

('Eichs broadcasting activity was limited to radio plays and breadwinning. Like many of the radio plays, fairy tale adaptation and calendar pages that Eich also wrote he never tried to 'make a career' out of it.')

Literary Prizes

Eich received numerous literary prizes after World War Two including one from the literary association of which he was a member, Gruppe 47 in 1950, the Georg-Büchner-Preis in 1959, and the Schiller-Gedächtnispreis in 1968.

External links

• Valuable Nail: Selected Poems, trans. Stuart Friebert, David Walker, and David Young, ISBN 0-932-44008-8
• Oberlin College Press site for Günter Eich