IN MELK I’M A PRINCE
Now that Ernst Jandl is dead, one can say without fear of contradiction that Robert Gernhardt is the best-known lyric poet in the German-speaking world. His poems are treasured in every household, his collected works are to be found on the shelves of every well-equipped library. Everybody quotes him. Lines like “Paul wrote to the Apaches: Ye shall not clap after the sermon”, or “The black bear is having fun, picking them off one by one”, or “I look in the mirror and see, a neck that is hateful to me”, or “Picture a truffle pig, now picture it gone” trigger thrills of recognition from the Baltic to the Alps, from the yellow press to the sophisticated FAZ literary journal. What is the basis for this popularity? What is it that has made this man – text-writer for pardon and Titanic and Otto Waalkes (“Dear God, please accept, that I am something special”) – a star even among the intelligentsia? Insofar as one can at all speak of a recipe for success, the key to Robert Gernhardt’s fame as a prose writer and especially as a poet is to be found in the special skill with which he interrelates critical analysis, language and self-reflection.
1968 jargon
In addition to wine, women and (to a lesser extent) song, the themes that keep recurring in his works include the leftist culture lying at the centre of the nasty, small-town mentality in Germany (Gernhardt has been living in Frankfurt since 1964). One of his most surreptitious poems, taken from the volume entitled Wörtersee (Sea of Words) (1981), satirizes in its very title the jargon of ’68 pedagogics that marched through the institutions: Materials for a critique of the best-known Italian poetic form. The poem begins as follows: “To me the sonnet is a shitty thing / so stiff, so rigid, somehow it isn’t right; / it makes me sick, I must confess, to think / that he who has the courage thus to write / today such bullshit …”; and continues in this tenor of com- plaint throughout all the fourteen lines of its sonnet form. By complaining, in the terms of German anti-institutional leftist culture, about the lack of spontaneity in the sonnet form and employing that same rigid form in an apparently spontaneous manner as the vehicle of complaint, is the most sophisticated and effective method of critical exposure. And, by the same token, the poet in doing so pays ironic tribute to Goethe, whose The Sonnet also treats in sonnet form very similar problems connected with that poetic form.
Aesthetically conservative
But Gerhardt’s joking is not only satirical: it has a deeper meaning, for without the form the poem would lose its wittiness. And herein lies the deepest secret of Gerhardt’s success: he is, in fact, an aesthetic conservative. Most of his poems pay homage to the classical forms of poetry. They even rhyme! And not only do the metres and rhymes play an important role in making his verses so easy to remember, they even constitute a vital element of his wit. Playing with rhymes that skilfully succeed or brilliantly fail (“Already wasted so much time, finding a word to rhyme with ‘rhyme’”), the slow build-up of expectations that are then elegantly dashed (Interpretation of an Allegorical Painting is a classic example), the pastiche on classical poems (such as Eichendorff’s Twilight: “As dusk creeps in, the bird of day / spreads her wings, preparing flight; / if you, too, want to get away, / just grab her rump and hold on tight.”) – all these things show that long before people began to quack in the German-speaking world about a supposed post-modernism, Gernhardt had realized that spiritual sparks only begin to fly where there is already a historical form present on which a poet can hammer away.
Unperson in Vienna
This position is also found in a remarkable volume of essays by Gernhardt, which many may find reactionary: The Last Painter is, as it were, a final reckoning with modernism in painting. What Gernhardt complains about is amateurism or, more precisely, about the destruction of the barriers between skilled craftsmanship and bungling, as manifested ultimately in Beuy’s dictum that everybody is an artist. It is easy to dismiss such views as the culturally conservative grousings of a former student of the fine arts whose own success in this genre never transcended that of the humorous drawing. It may be true that Gernhardt the painter was no great loss to the world. But if the thesis is valid that Gernhardt the poet owes his success to the ease and excellence of his craftsmanship, then it is fitting that his ideas about the fine arts should also be reflected upon sine ira et studio. His “one-syllable” couplet Unperson in Light Poems (1977) begins with the words “They know me in Graz / And they read me in Linz / In Steyr I’m a star/ And in Melk I’m a prince / The king of the poets they call me in Wels / But unperson, alas, in Vienna – where else!”. Indeed!
Wolfgang Fuhrmann
The unabridged version of this article appeared in Der Standard on 6 December 2001.
Monika Rittershaus, Backstage
Guest poet – Robert Gernhardt
Der Ton im Wörtersee
30 years of poetry by and
with Robert Gernhardt
Accompanied by music from 3 centuries
– from Bach to Scott Joplin with Frank Wolff (cello)
and Anne Baerenz (piano)
Carabinieri Hall in the Residenz
8 August 2002, 8 p.m.
Musiquette poétique
Performance with Robert Gernhardt, Martin Mosebach
– and Jaques Offenbach
Stage Jakob Mattner
Stadtkino
9 August 2002, 8 p.m.
Das Glück liegt auf dem Rücken der Verse
School of poetry: Robert Gernhardt hosts five
modern lyric poets
The Rittersaal in the Residenz
10 August 2002, 8 p.m.
Tickets are available from
the Festival Ticket Office for
€ 22, on 8 and 10 August for
€ 40, on 9 August for € 45.
Telephone: 0043 662 8045-500
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