Born: Tilsit, East Prussia (now Sovetsk, CIS) 9 April 1917. Education: Educated at high school in Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad); studied art history, University of Berlin, 1937-41. Military Service: Served in the army 1939-45; prisoner of war in Russia, captured 1945, released 1949. Family: Married Johanna Buddrus in 1943; four children. Career: Editor, Lucie Groszer, Berlin, 1950-59, and with Union Verlag, East Berlin, 1959. Awards: Gruppe 47 prize, 1962; Alma Konig prize, 1962; Heinrich Mann prize 1965; Veillon prize (Switzerland), 1965; Weiskopf prize, 1967 (posthumously). Died: 2 September 1965.
Publications
Collections
Gesammelte Werke, edited by Eberhard Haufe. 3 vols., 1987.
Shadow Lands: Selected Poems (includes the collections Shadow Land and From the Rivers and other poems), translated by Ruth and Matthew Mead. 1984.
Verse
Sarmatische Zeit. 1961.
Schattenland Strome. 1962.
Wetterzeichen. 1966.
Shadow Land, translated by Ruth and Matthew Mead. 1966.
Im Windgestrauch, edited by Eberhard Haufe. 1970.
Selected Poems: Johannes Bobrowski, Horst Bienek, translated by Ruth and Matthew Mead. 1971.
Gedichte 1952-1965. 1974.
From the Rivers, translated by Ruth and Matthew Mead. 1975.
Literarisches Klima: Ganz neue Xenien, doppelte Ausfuhrung. 1978.
Yesterday I Was Leaving, translated by Rich Ives. 1986.
The White Mirror: Poems, translated by Muska Nagel, 1993.
Fiction
Levins MUhle. 1964; as Levin’s Mill, translated by Janet Cropper, 1970.
Bohlendorff und andere: Erzahlungen. 1965.
Mausefest und andere Erzahlungen. 1965.
Litauische Claviere. 1966.
Der Mahner: Erzahlungen und andere Prosa. 1968.
Erzahlungen. 1969.
Drei Erzahlungen. 1970.
I Taste Bitterness (stories), translated by Marc Linder. 1970.
Die Erzahlungen. 1979.
Bohlendorff: A Short Story and Seven Poems, translated by Francis Golffing. 1989.
Darkness and a Little Light, translated by Leila Vennewitz, 1994.
Other
Nachbarschaft: Neun Gedichte; Drei Erzahlungen; Zwei Interviews; Zwei Grabreden; Zwei Schallplatten; Lebensdaten. 1967.
Editor, Die schonsten Sagen des klassichen Altertums, by Gustav Schwab. 1954.
Editor, Die Sagen von Troja und von der Irrfahrt und Heimkehr des
Odysseus, by Gustav Schwab. 1955.
Editor, Der markische Eulenspiegel, by Hans Clauert. 1956.
Editor, Leben Fibels, by Jean Paul. 1963.
Editor, Wer mich und Ilse sieht im Grase: Deutsche Poeten des 18.
Jahrhunderts Uber die Liebe und das Frauenzimmer. 1964.
Translator, with Gunther Deicke, Initialen der Leidenschaft, by Boris Pasternak. 1969.
Critical Studies:
West-Ostliches in der Lyrik Johannes Bobrowski by Sigrid Hofert, 1966; Johannes Bobrowski: Selbstzeugnisse und Beitrage Uber sein Werk, 1967, expanded edition, 1982; Bobrowski und andere. Die Chronik des Peter Jokostra, 1967; Johannes Bobrowski. Leben und Werk, 1967, and Beschreibung eines Zimmers. 15 Kapitel Uber Johannes Bobrowski, 1971, both by Gerhard Wolf; Johannes Bobrowski. Versuch einer Interpretation by Rudolf Bohren, 1968; Johannes Bobrowski by Brian Keith-Smith, 1970; Beschworung und Reflexion. Bobrowskis sarmatische Gedichte by Wolfram Mauser, 1970; Johannes Bobrowksi. Prosa. Interpretationen by Mechthild and Wilhelm Dehn, 1972; Johannes Bobrowski. Chronik, Einfuhrung, Bibliographie by Bernhard Gajek and Eberhard Haufe, 1977; Facetten. Untersuchungen zum Werk Johannes Bobrowskis by Alfred Behrmann, 1977; Erinnerung Johannes Bobrowski by Christoph Meckel, 1978;Ahornallee 26; oder, Epitaph fUr Johannes Bobrowski edited by Gerhard Rostin, 1978: Johannes Bobrowski. Studien und Interpretationen by Bernd Leistner, 1981; Johannes Bobrowskis Lyrik und die Tradition by Fritz Minde, 1981; Die aufgehobene Zeit. Zeitstruktur und Zeitelemente in der Lyrik Johannes Bobrowksis by Werner Schulz, 1983; Schattenfabel von den Versuchungen. Johannes Bobrowski. Zur 20. Wiederkehr seines Todestages, 1985; Understanding Johannes Bobrowski by David Scrase, 1995; Between Sarmatia and Socialism: The Life and Works of Johannes Bobrowski by John P. Wieczorek, 1999.
Johannes Bobrowski, who died from peritonitis in 1965 at the age of 45, was one of the most humane German writers of the 20th century, and the concept of ”humanitas” to bind communities together informs his works. This implies a willingness to learn from past mistakes and an openness to the needs of others. His declared central theme of atonement for German crimes against Eastern neighbours implies an awareness both of hidden, half-forgotten forces in the landscape and of a variety of ethnic characteristics among the villages and small towns along the river Memel. His combination of locally-based prejudices and events—the novel Levins MUhle (Levin’s Mill) and a sophisticated application of culture from the classical world (the sapphic form of ”Ode to Thomas Chatterton”), 18th-century writers and musicians (the story ”Epitaph for Pinnau” and his unpublished anthology ”Lieder von Heinrich Albert”) produced a highly personal style. Essential was the relationship of the individual to his environment and to language (the poem ”Dead Language”). This led him to search for the lifestyle and history of his ancestors (as can be seen from documents in his posthumous papers), and also to speak out against the inhumanity of his time, especially the Nazi period (the poem ”eport”). The border atmosphere and village life as a world theatre in miniature form the background to his landscape poetry (the poems ”Das Holzhaus uber der Wilna,” ”Village,” and ”The Sarmatian Plain,” also the stories ”Lipmann’s Leib” [Lipmann's Body] and ”In Pursuance of City Planning Considerations”). Equally important to him were the river landscapes (the poems ”In the Stream,” ”By the River,” ”The Don”) that he presents as coordinates of both time and place. School in Konigsberg— the town of Hamann and Kant—opened up to him a rich literary and musical heritage, and he developed a taste for Baroque music, for Bach, Buxtehude, and Mozart. He also learnt to appreciate the form and discipline of classical Greek and Latin writers. War service, especially in the army invading Poland, made him realize how fragile common humanity can be. This influenced much of his early, sometimes unpublished poetry and some of his short prose texts (the poems on Russia and texts such as ”Mouse Banquet” and ”The Dancer Malige”).
The link between his poetry and prose, which was written mainly during the last few years of his life, lies in the use of signs, on which Minde and Behrmann among others have written. Yet he was constantly aware of the foreshortening, deadening, and dehumanizing potentials of language—hence the search in his second novel Litauische Claviere for an operatic form where reconciliation of political views and fusion of modes of expression might be fully explored. His works, set in a frontier land of German and Lithuanian districts (e.g. the novels Levin’s Mill and Litauische Claviere) include examples of a level of consciousness between dream and wide-awake reality (the poem ”Eichendorff” and the short story ”Das Kaiuzchen” [The Little Owl]) where memories bring an awakening to a further dimension of reality. Through an unexpected event the everyday is revealed as only one level of experience (the poem ”Elder Blossom”).
Literature can function as a breaker of time barriers and create a sense of mythic existence as in the poem ”Die Gunderrode” [Gunderrode]. A Weg nach innen (way inwards) a la Novalis is based on the magic power of the word, yet Bobrowski used myth not to expand into the elemental, endless, or universal as with the Romantics, but to refer with his metaphors to a more intense understanding on the local human level. His works were thus a deliberate quest for cultural, historical, and natural roots. The use of open form bringing heterogenous elements together in an apparently often unresolved manner was designed to shock the reader, assist him sometimes to laugh, and help him to comprehend more fully the nature of the reasons behind his existence (the poem ”Village Music” and the short story ”De homine publico tractatus”). In both prose and poetry he paid strict attention to metric as opposed to strophic or linear structure as basic building blocks, thus emphasizing his sense of control, of Bebauung over his material.
The more ”naive” evocation of the past in his poems of the 1950s—”Der litauische Brunnen” [The Lithuanian Well], ”Der Singschwan” [Singing Swan], ”Die alte Heerstrasse” [The Old Army Road]—contained a definite epic quality. This gave way to a tone of lament for the loss of a previous world, and the poetic images began to assume the qualities of a cipher (”Always to Be Named,” ”Nanie”), He became a master of finding objective correlatives and set them with great verbal economy and rich variety of poetic device. Most of his poems are short, but they are full of nuances and hidden allusions. His prose works also developed from evocation and direct assimilation of the past towards emphatic statements of a new sense of community service (”Contemplation of a Picture”). Basic to poems and prose is often a structure that includes a negative warning that registers the past, followed by a call for closer involvement with nature, and finally an act of naming or finding the fitting poetic language to resuscitate a lost dimension of human awareness.
By including the perspective of a narrator, Bobrowski often ensured that sentimentality is cut out and the reader becomes aware of a directed form of detailed portrayal highlighting the co-existence of different worlds (especially in the longest of his short prose works ”Bohlendorff”). A form of score with variants and counterpoint emerged in his prose works, just as with a work for an organ, an instrument that Bobrowski particularly cherished.
Since his early death Bobrowski has become known throughout the world because he developed a poetic language with a mastery of imagery, rhythm, and musicality. He understood the everyday world and political theories to be sterile and non-creative—the interplay of history and landscape seemed to him healthier and closer to the secret wishes of man in general. He combined a serious-minded, peace-loving message with an almost therapeutically ironic distancing from all human foibles. It is not surprising that half of his posthumous papers consist of letters from friends from many countries, for he sought above everything dialogue between all human beings (the poem ”The Word Man”). The freshness of his works depends on his success in keeping them free from nostalgia and sentimentality, his rare mastery of technical detail, knowledge of several historical atmospheres, a light touch, and an eye for positive humanity.
