Abstract
Mererid Puw Davies’ new monograph, following on from her Writing and the West German Protest Movements: The Textual Revolution (2016), owes much to its unruly subject matter: West German poetic writing against the atrocities committed by US troops in Vietnam in the name of protecting the West from Communism. Its chapters form a collage, held together by the Leitmotif of ‘fire’ that initially feels forced but certainly reflects the dominant trope of ‘1968’ (cf. Chris Harmann’s The Fire Last Time. 1968 and After, 1988). The book holds extra significance in the context of new wars dominating the news and our imaginations (Russia/Ukraine; Israel/Hamas).
The introduction situates poetic writing against the Vietnam War within the broader extra-parliamentary West German opposition to the conflict, arguing that within an ardent anti-war discourse, ‘poetry was key and its dominant trope was fire’ (p. 1). Davies suggests that when writers turned to the distinctive literary form of poetry, it seemed to invest their words with greater value. Paradoxically, most West German anti-war poems of the time are ‘almost entirely forgotten today’ (p. 1), a situation that Davies sets out to remedy. She argues that the symbolic quality of poetic writing is particularly suitable to encode and crystallise contradictions and ambiguities, while the relative absence of voices from Vietnam essentially offered West German writers a blank canvas for their own ideas, shaped by their own memory of war and violence in Europe, but also their experience of living in a similarly divided country at the sharp end of the Cold War. While the often avant-gardist poems constitute a ‘kind of difficult writing’, Davies asserts their disruptive significance based on their representative features rather than their supposed canonical value.
Chapter 1 observes that while the Vietnam War was the topic of heated debates among representatives of high literature (Enzensberger, Grass), it represents a ‘blind spot’ in well-known literature from the time, especially in comparison to East German literature, with the exception of Erich Fried’s und Vietnam und: einundvierzig Gedichte (1966) and Peter Weiss’ Vietnam Diskurs (1968), both written by emigres from an older generation. Further additions to Davies’ corpus are individual texts from Kursbuch by Paul Celan, Günter Anders and Peter Schütt.
Chapter 2 focuses on the ‘missing in action’ anti-war poems in West Germany, a state of affairs partly explained by Günter Grass’ initially scathing view of anti-war poetry as an indication of ‘Ohnmacht’ and as such completely unsuitable for political interventions. Davies counters that assessment by exploring gegen den krieg in Vietnam, edited by riewert qu. tode, an anthology of poems published to coincide with the Internationale Vietnam Kongress held in West Berlin in February 1968. She sees the ‘ground-breaking, if now forgotten poetic publication’ (p. 59) that includes poems by tode, Nicolas Born, p.g. hübsch, Yaak Karsunke, Fitzgerald Kusz, Peter Schütt and Peter Paul Zahl as a seismograph of the times for the way it encapsulates the ‘poetics of disobedience’ which manifested itself as an ‘unruly, disreputable form’ (p. 74). Given the movement’s watchword of ‘permanent change’, it should not surprise that the volume’s final poem by Karlhans Frank concludes with the lines: Keine Gedichte gegen den Krieg in Vietnam! // AKTIONEN!!!
Chapter 3 provides an excursion on portrayals of girls and women in German anti-war writing. Ranging from Stefan Zürcher’s long poem Das Gesetz der Nine Rules (1968), via Peter Weiss‘ Notizen zum kulturellen Leben der Demokratischen Republik Viet Nam (1968), to Georg W. Alsheimer’s Vietnamesische Lehrjahre (1968), Davies shows the gendered and often sexualized representations of Vietnam in these works, but also their authors’ awareness of the inadequacy and precarity of these constructs.
Chapter 4 looks at the intermedial relation between film and photography on one side and anti-war poetry on the other. When images of war (which were piped almost without filter into German homes during the late 1960s and early 1970s) are refracted through poems (e.g. in 13 out of 59 poems in tode’s anthology), they are revealed as commodification that become part of an evening’s entertainment. Davies makes a particularly strong point when she analyses Ingo Cesaro’s short poem Pressepreis (1969) that critically engages with the role of photographers as purveyors of such fare.
Chapter 5 explores the (in)famous cycle of Kommune I flyers satirically commenting on the tragic fire in a department store in Brussels in May 1967 which led to a trial against some of its members for inciting violence. By taking these flyers seriously as ‘manifestations of poetic language’ (p. 146), Davies interprets them as triggers for major shifts in culture and communication. While the flyers move from satirically copying news-style, advertising and protest language, it is the poetic language of flyer 9 that provides the link to the previous chapters. In its ‘euphoric representation of the burning department store’ (p. 159), the ‘voice of poetry’ is used to draw attention to the neutralization of the idea of revolution in the service of capitalism. While there is a suggestion that this flyer also addresses the human suffering, Davies is somewhat coy about the ‘incendiary’ impact of KI ideas on the arsonists who set fire to a Frankfurt department store in April 1968, an ‘Aktion’ that started a whole new chapter of violence (cf. Ada Wilson’s Red Army Faction Blues, 2012).
Chapter 6 moves the discussion and argument to a higher level, asking important questions about the impact of what some literary scholars would call ‘ephemeral’ literature, and what, to be sure, are almost forgotten texts today. Not only does Davies assert ‘the potential of poetry to circulate and create dialogues transnationally’, but she also demonstrates anti-war writing’s ability to formulate a ‘critique of representation itself’ (p. 185). While the KI flyers may have dominated the headlines for a while and achieved an impact that eludes most traditional literature, the other texts analysed in this volume surely acted as accelerators for the fire of protest. When Davies reflects on ‘poetry and history’, she rightly concludes that ‘the Vietnam topic allowed poets obliquely to write about extreme violence perpetrated relatively recently by Germans, or in their name’ (p. 200).
The book’s strength lies in its broad approach that contextualises a historical nexus point and seeks to explain the meaning of ‘Vietnam’ for (West)Germany by exploring anti-war poetic responses by lesser-known German writers. While her claim that the study ‘both augments and rewrites the literary and cultural history of both the West German protest movements in particular and the FRG in general’ (p.2) may be an exaggeration (particularly given their minority status), it certainly offers higher-level reflections on the role of art in political discourse. Clearly structured and meticulously researched, it combines a synoptic view and detailed case studies. While the corpus is substantial and reflects the intense archival work undertaken to unearth some of these texts, it would have been useful to have a wider range of quotations as most of these texts are difficult to obtain. At the same time, Davies’ keen sensitivity as a poet enables her to pinpoint the subtle but often devastating punch hidden behind a few well-set words, for example, Erich Fried’s apocalyptic final lines in his poem Einbürgerung: ‘Weiße Knochen // roter Sand // blauer Himmel’. Here, the biblical imagination of fire and brimstone collides head-on with the star-spangled banner.