The Meaning of Four Books: On the Variability of Culture

Abstract

tion at Cambridge. I first learned of it from a lecture by Helmut Kreuzer in Stuttgart, then subsequently from his anthology Literarische und naturwissenschaftliche Intelligenz: Dialog uber die Zwei Kulturen (Literary and Scientific Intelligence: Dialogue on the Two Cultures),1 published in 1968.2 That same year I had begun my studies at the Technical College later University of Stuttgart, with a major in chemistry and including the subjects of physics, higher mathematics, mineralogy, and mechanical engineering. I finished in 1966 with a degree in chemistry. My sole publication in this field was a summary of my thesis on the subject Uber die Bildung und Reaktionsweise von Polyacrylamidmethylolen und deren Anwendung fur Steifappreturen (On the Formation and Reactability of Polyacrylamidmethylols and Their Use as Starching Agents).3 Directly upon finishing this degree, I officially began seamlessly, so to speak my second degree in the humanities, majoring in literature and philosophy. I finished in 1972 with a dissertation titled Die Dramaturgic des Einakters: Der Einakter als eine besondere Form in der deutschen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts (The Dramaturgy of the One-Act Play: The One-Act Play as a Particular Form in German Literature of the Eighteenth Century). In the year 1959 I published my first poems and did my first translations from German to Turkish, among others Morike's aphorism Mausefallen (Mousetraps). That same year I simultaneously found my way into Max Bense's esthetics colloquium, Kathe Hamburger's Thomas Mann lecture, and Helmut Kreuzer's Monday general-studiesevening series with guest writers. Here I had my first encounters with Enzensberger, Jandl, Walser, and many others. In the early 1960s, moreover, Hermann Lenz was, like myself, a regular visitor to these meetings. I already knew Helmut HeiBenbuttel, Helmut Mader, and Ludwig Harig, among others, through the so-called Stuttgart School led by Bense. Friederike Roth was my colleague. In that year 1959 I was active in Reinhard Dohl's radioplay group and took part in a short film by the young Georg Bense. Chemistry, physics, and mathematics must have stimulated my receptivity and particularly my interest in Bense's esthetics colloquium, which mainly dealt with numerical esthetics and semiotics, with physical concepts such as entropy and text entropy. From this there soon arose my affinity for poetry, for chemicalized texts, I would even say today. As in the laboratory I had once extracted from 100 grams of tea leaves some 2-3 grams of snow-white caffeine, my early concrete texts isolated components and building blocks from colloquial speech letters, words, stage sets that signified only the material from which they arose and concretely meant only themselves and nothing else. From them I constructed new creations with simple structures: for example, the liberation of the bird from the cage of the paragraph, or the concrete love text half lover.