‘WAS ZWISCHEN DEN BLÄTTERN FÄLLT’: FIGURES OF MEMORY IN THREE POEMS BY MANFRED PETER HEIN

Abstract

ABSTRACTManfred Peter Hein is a post‐war German poet who has received little critical attention. This article looks at three poems from his later work which are linked by a single image: the falling leaf. The article outlines aspects of Hein's discourse on memory and looks at formal characteristics of Hein's work such as his interest in Japanese poetry. Form and content are by no means separate: the Japanese tradition and its forms influence Hein's use of images from the natural world in discussing historical memory.The three poems in question are ‘Dann sind Namen gefallen’, ‘Kaunas 1941’, and ‘Erinnern daran’, all published in 2006. In these poems, the falling leaf is variously used to represent the victims of genocide and mass murder, together with the scale of those crimes, to allude to the insufficiency of language and the impossibility of remembrance, and to explore ideas of singularity and recurrence. The article places the poems in the context of Hein's career and explains concepts from Japanese poetics relevant to his work. The article concludes that while Hein's poems also constitute a practice of remembrance, the poet sees historical memory as something at once impossible and inescapable.