Durs Grünbein

Life and career

Durs Grünbein studied theater in Berlin, where he lives as a freelance writer since 1987. He debuted in 1988 with a small book of poems, titled Grauzone morgens. In 1991 he published his second small book of poems, the Schädelbasislektion . Grünbein has been awarded many German literary prizes, including the Georg-Büchner-Preis, which he won in 1995. That same year, he also won the Peter Huchel Prize for Poetry. In 2005, he held the position of Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College. Since 2006, Grünbein is a visiting professor at the academy of fine arts at Düsseldorf and at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee. In 2009 he was a poet in residence at the Villa Massimo in Rome. Grünbein is a regular contributor to Frau und Hund - Zeitschrift für kursives Denken, edited by the academy's rector, the painter Markus Lüpertz. Grünbein has also published several essay collections and new translations of plays from antiquity, among them Aeschylus' The Persians, and Seneca's Thyestes. Some of his works, which also includes contributions to catalogues and a libretto for opera, have been translated into several languages.

Articles, essays

Books in English translation

Critical reception

After the opening of the Wall and the reunification of both states of Germany, there was an increased interest, to publish young writers from former East Germany. This tolerant trend came in useful for Durs Grünbein. He received critical respect for his Schädelbasislektion (Scull base lecture), a poetry book with strong and with weak and bad verses, as the literary critic adjugded. The poems are talking about how someone can manage not to become insane in the locked country The best of them succeeding this motif with a specious intensity, the bad ones are full of empty statements" because of the author’s compulsion for French theorists of simulation,as the critic early on warned. Initially welcomed by the German publicist Frank Schirrmacher as the first genuine voice of the new republik, the same one later declared a lot of Grünbein’s poetry as mere clichés of clichés. Even former admirers—e.g. as the critic Ernst Osterkamp—changed their standpoint little by little into a harsher position. Thus Grünbein’s poetry book "Aroma" was criticized by Osterkamp as an "highfaluting talk of Roman trivialities and banalities with stilted little finger, as if it were precious items". Therefore, Fritz. J. Raddatz, one of the most influential literary critic, designated that Grünbein succeed sometimes quite remarkable poems but not an acceptable poetic work, and called out the poet himself as versifying washout, who squanders his given talent.