Reiner Kunze: Zimmerlautstärke. Gedichte. Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1978. 69 pp.
Reiner Kunze was forced to leave the GDR on April 13, 1977. Three years later, almost to the day (April 9, 1980), he appeared in Manhattan where he gave a reading, mostly from Die wunderbaren Jahre. At the time I was finishing up my dissertation at Cornell while working at Mary S. Rosenberg’s Foreign Language Bookstore. I took a copy of Kunze’s Die wunderbaren Jahre and Zimmerlautstärke to the reading and followed along, making marginal notations and adding more later that evening. What follows is based on those notes, with slight modifications to improve readability.
Most of the texts Kunze read extremely quickly, so that I had difficulty keeping up with him even when following the printed text. Remarkable, considering this tempo, that he so rarely misspoke.
From this book he read “Auf einen Vertreter der Macht“ with a long pause after each comma, enjambment after the first line, a long pause between stanzas, no enjambment in second stanza. So if written as spoken, the poem would look like this:
Sie vergessen,
sagte er,
wir haben den längeren arm
Dabei ging es um den kopf
As printed, of course, it looks like this:
Sie vergessen, sagte er, wir haben
den längeren arm
Dabei ging es
um den kopf
„Pfarrhaus“ (für pfarrer W.) he read twice, with emphasis on „muβ.“
Wer da bedrängt ist findet
mauern, ein
dach und
muβ nicht beten
Nonetheless, only now, when I read it to myself for the first time, do I begin to understand it.
“Auf dich im blauen Mantel“ (für Elisabeth)
Elisabeth – his wife. No enjambment after first line, pause after “häuserzeile,” no enjambment after second line, pause after “dich,” pause after “komma,” no enjambment after third line. It seemed to me that “dich” and “das blaue komma” are in apposition. Read twice. If written as spoken, the poem would look like this:
Von neuem lese ich von vorn die häuserzeile
suche dich
das blaue komma
das sinn gibt
As printed, it looks like this:
Von neuem lese ich von vorn
die häuserzeile suche
dich das blaue komma das
sinn gibt
„Zuflucht noch hinter der zuflucht,“ which begins with the lines:
Hier tritt ungebeten nur der wind durchs tor
Hier
ruft nur Gott an
had a special pointe to it, being read in the midst of a thunderstorm – a cooperative one. Read once. Here again I understand better now.
I wonder how often Kunze has read in public. He reads so quickly – out of nervousness? Sometimes it is effective as an imitation of Berlin dialect, but other times is simply hard to understand without being particularly Berlinisch. He has a way of pursing his lips and straining his throat muscles that makes me think that if he has done it before, it still is not easy for him. He seemed to be especially nervous at the start, continually shifting his weight from one foot to the other – rather distracting. He stood during the entire delivery.
Afterwards he signed my copy of the book:
Reiner Kunze
New York, d. 9. 4. 80
(To read about the Q&A that followed, see the entry for Die wunderbaren Jahre elsewhere at this site.)
hamiltonbeck 