Michael Krüger | At Night, Beneath Trees / 1998

german angst

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Krüger At Night, Beneath Trees, translated from the German by Richard Dove (New York: George Braziller, 1998)

 

Michael Krüger writes the kind of angst-ridden, lyrical meditations with which American readers have little experience and American (innovative) poets have little truck. The present clearly is too much with us in Krüger’s vision. As he writes in one of the best poems of the collection At Night, Beneath Trees, “Letter to a Child,” “I’m sorry, there’s too much now / too little yesterday and tomorrow in this letter….” And things of the present, the computer’s “Glassy emerald eye,” theories of the end of history, the landlord’s edict that he move out of his house, the fires of the Los Angeles riots are all equally emblems of danger if not the direct sources of the poet’s evident despair. Occasionally Krüger treats his frightening and befuddling landscape with a sense of detachment and ironic, Günter Eich-like wit, as in the poem dedicated to Eich (“Commemorative Sheet for Günter Eich”) or as in “The Mailman’s Allocution”—

 

                                 I’ve got a charming collection

                                 of postcards I couldn’t deliver

                                    .....

                                All those lovely canceled faces:

                                Adenauer, Franco, the doleful king of Greece

                                who, although long exiled, was still being

                                stamped on.–

 

—that at least relieves if not redeems his present angst. But for Krüger the past also offers little consolation. The horrors of the past, “wrested out of History’s jaws,” offer only an easy excuse for exit; the “Little German National Anthem” of gemutlichkeit by the hearth is brilliantly satirized:

 

                                Just imagine we asked the brook

                                to leave its gravelly bed so the fish

                                would not have to cross the land

                                on its way to our pot.

 

     Consequently, the poet’s despair—expressed primarily in a vague fear of perpetual war and in the more concrete image of a people being fed by Hitler now eating with “a fork in each neck”—emanates from a place outside of the writing, leaving the reader (at least the non-German reader) as cold witness rather than participant in the poet’s outcries. And although the poet may dismiss the very concept of the “end of history,” he has created his own endgame, has painted himself in, so to speak, in his desperate search for “the faintest echo / of a single feeble answer,” “Sloes and snow and rowanberries, / that must suffice.”

     The focus on the now—frightful as it is for Krüge—nonetheless does reverberate with occasional possibility in his strongest poems such as “To Zbigniew Herbert,” “Writers Congress,” and “The Cemetery.” But it is, finally, by just standing still, the witnessing of the world itself wherein Krüger places any hope.

                                    

New York, 1998

Reprinted from Mr. Knife, Miss Fork, No. 3 (August 2003).