Michael Hamburger: Voice of Lost Poetry

Abstract

At a garden party in Norwich I saw Max Sebald kneel on one knee to a seated Michael Hamburger engaging him in conversation with an attitude that struck me at the time as reverential. Sebald was lecturer (later professor) in German in the School of European Studies at the University of East Anglia (Norwich), and his colleagues did not know of the extent of his ambitions and hopes as a writer, which came to light gradually only as he accumulated a reputation in Germany in the 1990s. They knew him only as a good colleague, with the interests of the department at heart, which he prosecuted with very effective humour in the classroom and committee rooms, where his sallies often carried the day. If he sometimes showed a touch of gallows humour in the corridors, that was all the more effective with over-worked colleagues. It was only in Michael Hamburger that he confided and to whom he appealed as an authority and deferred as a mentor. This seemed entirely natural to me, and confirmed my own experience of Michael. I had come to knowMichael in Berlin, not in Norfolk, and had already seen with my own eyes the respect in which he was held. I arrived in Berlin in 1976 on a six-month research fellowship, and contacted Michael, as he bade me do when I had recently met him in London. He was at the time at the Haus der Kunste (House of the Arts), of which he’d been elected a