Peter Huchel

Essays | Winter 1994

Peter Huchel

Joseph Brodsky

In the 20th century, German history has done its best to obscure German poetry. Murder makes better copy, and when foreign troops march into your country you are not in a mood to read their bards and classics, unless of course you work for intelligence. Nor does your interest get much of a boost from those troops' defeat. Nearly 50 years after World War II's carriage, we are still more familiar with the names of the Third Reich's leaders than with those of Else Lasker-Schuler, Gottfried Benn, Gunter Eich, Karl Krolov, Ingeborg Bachmann, or Peter Huchel. Apparently, the dust hasn't settled yet.

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Winter 1994
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Most likely, it never will, which alone turns dust into a form of existence. It turns out that, among its other properties, dust also possesses a voice:

Gedenlh meiner,
Fliistert der Staub.

Remember me,
whispers the dust.
 
This is what the dust says according to one of the finest German poets of this century, Peter Huchel. Huchel was born in 1903 and died in 1981. He grew up on a farm in the eastern part of Germany, in Prussia, and studied in Berlin, Freiburg, and Vienna. Between wars, he traveled a fair bit in Hungary, Romania, Turkey, and France. That was a lean time for most Germans, and he'd often pay for his sojourns in these places with the only marketable skill he had acquired in his youth: farm work.