Literary awareness of the crisis
and Russia’s War Against Ukraine
Presence of mind and a sense of crisis: Durs Grünbein
On 24 February the unthinkable happened. The armed forces of the Russian Federation, known in the West as Russia, invaded its neighbor, the sovereign state of Ukraine. They attacked a country whose independence they had repeatedly guaranteed in bilateral agreements. The Russians have now been at war for several weeks. They are waging a war that they cannot even call a war: this is pitiful. They are waging a war under pretexts that convince nobody, not even themselves: this is absurd. They are waging it in a botched manner and with high losses on their side: this is self-destructive. They are waging it, miserable military strategists that they are, against a defenseless civilian population: this is a war crime.6
This date, which has a firm place in the memory of East (Central) European countries such as Poland or Estonia, is also the title and subject of a poem that the poet included in his anthology Äquidistanz, which appeared in July 2022. In this poem, turning points in history and in the present day are connected to each other in various ways:
[…]
Fly back to the beginning, my soul, back
to the years of formation, years of illusion 10
for millions, back to the eerie threshold,
where the dragons almost kissed, like the
towering pavilions at the Paris World Fair,
and the Polyp Cosmocrator, harbinger of destruction,
fell as a shadow over the masses. 15
Do your rounds through peacetime Europe
before the massacres began, the purges
in the paranoia-capital of the new workers’ paradise,
the labor camps, construction sites, steel works
in the second as the world trembled, when anything was possible 20
between Fascism and Communism,
[…]
It was an unremarkable day, when a few 25
squat men, inferior characters, tyrants,
exchanged whole peoples between them,
when the blind leading the blind of the century
decided to hold their peoples as hostages,
to play with borders, with landscapes. 30
The hour of the cartographers in their offices
The hour of the massing of files (Soviet state security,
Gestapo),
registration of all people in their own state
as in all occupied zones
with identification numbers, photos, fingerprints 35
for continued use (work or death).
[...]9
Both his essay Nichts berechtigt uns zur Hoffnung and the poem allude to the suicide of Walter Benjamin in the summer of 1940, and having established the parallels between 1940 and 2022, end with a haunting warning.
For Grünbein, who is both a historical and a political poet, engaging in contemporary politics and writing poetry are not mutually exclusive but mutually dependent. His texts are steeped in history and at the same time, based on the present. Geistesgegenwart (“Presence of Mind”), the title of the essay he wrote in Spring 2023, is how he describes the moment of lyrical inspiration as well as the alert participation in current events10. The Hitler Stalin Pact was seen as a turning point in Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic but not in post-war Germany. If he presents this Pact, in his poem of the same name, as a historical rupture, he is also calling for a change in our perception of the narrative that has become established in the West. Grünbein links the current Russian aggression to the aggression with which Hitler and Stalin divided up Eastern Europe between themselves. On this, his position is quite different to that of Juli Zeh, Simon Urban and Alexander Kluge, who also use the Second World War as a historical reference point but who, in their pacifism, remain blind to the experience of the “Bloodlands” between Moscow and Berlin. As Jana Mende has pointed out, in this manner these authors have managed to shift the discourse away from the suffering of the victims of the war to the fear of war and the memories of war on the part of the Germans.
Personal and social upheaval: Kerstin Preiwuss
The author is aware of the issues surrounding the display of such private experiences and fears. However, according to her, socio-political upheavals have changed the relationship between the personal and the public, between one’s own and a more general catastrophe, as is made clear in the section on the Covid pandemic:
In the moment when personal misfortune and general catastrophe coincide, misfortune paradoxically ceases to be private and becomes communicable, since everyone suffers in the catastrophe.13
Your references become dissolved in the tones of the sirens, the delicate systems within which you are used to thinking and simplify themselves brutally. The security of your established thought patterns dissolves with every bomb blast.16
Your early warning system did not work, although the threshold value was exceeded, piled up at the border, and all the while one could see how the assault took its course […] [W]hile you waited for a sign that was supposed to predict something for you, so that you could orientate yourself, in this summer between two waves, you overlooked the threatening scenery that was being built up piece by piece. The war was already here, but it did not cross the threshold.18
Advocacy from a distance: Marcel Beyer
In the time that today lies in the infinitely distant past, in that epoch that is two or three or four or five or six or eight or more weeks back, an epoch that is now closed off for all time, when one could still attempt to seek refuge at least mentally from an all-powerful, inescapable horror.23
In this manner Beyer conceives of non-human life-forms “as protectors of humanity” in times when humanity is called into question.28 On the one hand he exposes our media mechanisms, that is, the selection of pictures and their presentation as well as our patterns of perception. On the other, Beyer frees us, through his focus on animals in war and the shift in perspective that this creates, from this blunting of experience and enhanced representation of the horrors of war. This use of displacement challenges our habits of perception and at the same time extends the space in which we experience. Moreover, the expansion continues by transcending the boundaries between the senses, since Beyer extends our view of the silent photographs to include the obvious acoustics of our imagination. Presumably the dog on the street in Irpin is having its ears covered by its owner, because the explosions sound much louder for the dog; as soon as we understand what is being depicted, the events in the silent picture (which does not show any horror, only a man concerned about his dog) can be experienced through the ears of the dog. Beyond the obscenity of war that is transmitted through the media, the horror of war becomes visibly audible here.
In this way, the author’s dismay at the inhumanity of war is illustrated through gestures of humanity addressed not to humans but to animals. The explosions heard by the dog are set in stark contrast to the concern of the dog’s owner. The inclusion of these passages in an otherwise factual text demonstrates the strong emotional involvement of an author who is “on the side of Ukraine”.29
Ruptures and new beginnings
The works of Grünbein, Preiwuss and Beyer display a pronounced awareness of the turning point marked by 24 February 2022. The authors struggle to find appropriate literary means to capture and convey the scope of the events. They share the sense that the war upsets social or personal patterns of thought and perception and are all searching for forms of language to express this confusion and shock.