“Sterbender Mann mit Spiegel”: Lyrisch reflektiertes Sterben bei Heiner Müller, Robert Gernhardt und Ernst Jandl by Debora Helmer (review)

In 1862 the New York Times reviewed an exhibition of photographs called “The Dead at Antietam” by Mathew Brady, stating: “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us that terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.” Upon reading the excellent study by Dr. Debora Helmer, a Germanist at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, I had a similar feeling. This “Lyrisch reflektiertes Sterben,” like those photographs, brought to focus a new awareness and reality of death as individually experienced. Helmer brought into mainstream literary discussion the capacity to depict reality through poetry. She chose three prominent writers, two German and one Austrian, who turned to poetry to deal with their physical and mental struggles as they faced their approaching deaths. The effect is unsettling. Heiner Müller, the renowned German playwright, died of throat cancer in 1995. Robert Gernhardt, a German writer, satirist, and poet, contracted cancer in 2002 and struggled for four years before succumbing. Ernst Jandl, one of the most important Austrian poets of the twentieth century, died after a long period of poor health in 2000.

On the first page of her thorough study, Helmer anticipated the potential criticism of her book that it exploited the suffering and death of these three poets. She rightfully points out that she is not delving into the private lives of these men, restricting herself to material they themselves published or broadcast. The other anticipated criticism is more central to the task of literary criticism as it raises the question of whether a poem can communicate authentic experience, that is, whether we can view the poetic “ich” as the voice of the author. Those schooled in the methodology and assumptions of poststructural literary studies would answer with an emphatic “no.” But Helmer counters that in the cases of Müller, Gernhardt and Jandl, the poets are trying to communicate their personal experience and struggle with death and dying to readers, and this circumstance may invalidate the usual gap between literature and reality. She argues that the “Sterbegedicht” is a distinct literary genre, which in its highly personal and individual confrontation with imminent death changes the relationship between author and the poetic “ich.” To do this, she turns to the philosopher, Ernst Tugendhat, who identified the distinction between Eigenschaft and Ereignis in relationship to one’s view of mortality. Contemplating one’s own mortality (Eigenschaft) can produce melancholy or despair, but not fear. Fear comes with the imminent threat of death (Ereignis). Thus, writing about death as a human condition is quite different from the perspective of one who is standing at the precipice of extinction. There are many examples of literary works dealing with mortality. Some even project the reactions at the moment of death, but these three poets were in the process of dying and applied their art to this experience. Helmer sees an additional factor that is conducive to the distinction of this genre. Imminent death rarely allows poetic reflection. These three poets, perhaps due to modern medical intervention, had extended time to reflect about their dying, and they did so publicly in their writings and, in some cases, televised interviews. Helmer states that she is thus parting company with most literary critics by asserting that in these poems, the lyrical “ich” or the speaker in the poems is the direct voice of the author. Given the assumption of a hypothetical intentionality in this new genre, her study attempts to determine what the author wanted to communicate about the “art of dying.”

The question of how one is to face death, or Sterbekunst, has been the subject of literature through the centuries and has always been rooted in a cultural and social context. Helmer notes that unlike...