Drehe die Herzspindel weiter für mich: Christine Lavant zum 100 ed. by Klaus Amann, Fabjan Hafner, and Doris Moser (review)

Ten poems by Christine Lavant, accompanied by original poems, monologues, dialogues, and essays by twenty-seven contemporary authors comprise this anthology, forming an excellent companion to the four-volume edition of Lavant’s works that Wallstein Verlag is publishing. The first two volumes have already appeared (volume one, Zu Lebzeiten veröffentlichte Gedichte, edited by Fabjan Hafner and Doris Moser, appeared in 2014; volume two, Zu Lebzeiten veröffentlichte Erzählungen, edited by Klaus Amann and Brigitte Strasser, appeared in 2015). Volume three, Gedichte aus dem Nachlass, appeared in 2017 (with previously unpublished poems; Lavant published only about one third of her poems during her lifetime), and volume four in 2018 (with already published as well as previously unpublished prose). In Dreh die Herzspindel weiter für mich, the combination of poems by Lavant and by well-known and budding Austrian poets—Maja Haderlap, Christoph W. Bauer, Kerstin Hensel, Arne Rautenberg, Hansjörg Schertenleib, Silke Andrea Schuemmer, Steffen Popp, Raphael Urweider, Andreas Altmann, Evelyn Schlag, and Ulf Stolterfoht—that comprise the first part of the book presents a multifaceted assemblage that adds welcome dimensions to analyzing and understanding Lavant’s oeuvre a hundred years after her birth. As the editors state in their brief foreword, the purpose of the volume is to read Lavant anew, not only in the context of her autobiographically existential suffering, which is the context in which writers and scholars have often interpreted her work (Thomas Bernhard being one of her admirers), but with fresh perspectives. Viewed through both an experimental as well as a traditional lens, the poems in the first section and the monologues, dialogues, and essays in the subsequent five sections focus on the lyrical, social, political, and feminist aspects of her works.

The slim size of the book belies the profundity of its contents. The volume features an engaging generational span of contributors, who often refer to their emotions after reading Lavant’s poetry and prose for the first time. Those emotions run the gamut of shock, enthusiasm, fear, anxiety, and empathy. Belonging to the generation born before 1950 is writer Friederike Mayröcker, whose “Selfie der Christine Lavant” begins the volume with Lavant’s own words. Literary critics Michael Krüger and Peter Hamm include essays about their longstanding fascination with Lavant’s works. Hamm relates how at the end of the 1980s, he had submitted Lavant’s poem “Kreuzzertretung” to Marcel Reich-Ranicki for inclusion in the Frankfurter Anthologie. Reich-Ranicki did not like the poem, but Hamm insisted on including a poem by Lavant. They decided on “Nur des Schlafes wilder Nebenzweig,” but Reich-Ranicki did not like Hamm’s interpretive essay and did not print it. Hamm had found the essay under some papers and decided to include it in the present volume. Also of this generation is writer, translator, and literary critic Ilma Rakusa, who takes pleasure in a close analysis of the paradoxes in Lavant’s poems “Zwiespältig steigt der Hahnenschrei” and “Ich lerne das A und das O.”

Belonging to the next generation, born between 1950 and 1975, writer and translator Dorothea Grünzweig depicts the constant eruptions of emotions and language in Lavant’s poetry as “Lavantsche Lava” (70). As the translator of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry into German, Grünzweig adeptly compares Hopkins and Lavant. Writer and translator Monika Rinck employs the poem “Zieh den Mondkork endlich aus der Nacht!” to present twelve differing introductions to themes, motifs, and beliefs in Lavant’s works. Writer Marlene Streeruwitz conducts a close analysis of the poem “Wo treibt mein Elend sich herum?” as an “actio personalis” depicting a sadistic, authoritarian upbringing. The poem thus straddles the realms of literary creation and legal grievance related to domestic relations. Writer Ferdinand Schmatz, preoccupied with the struggles...