James Krüss. Insulaner und Weltbürger (review)

With Islander and Cosmopolitan, Klaus Doderer, former director of the Frankfurt Institute for Studies in Children's Literature, pays tribute to his friend James Krüss, whose verses about Corinth, the Magician, or pugs drinking schnaps are part and parcel of every German child's imagination. Within the context of a recent Krüss-revival, Doderer's book gives surprising insights into the poet's life and work. The book is divided into three parts: the first part offers a biographical approach and most importantly, squarely situates Krüss's life within the contemporary historical context. Krüss (just one year younger than Doderer himself) was born in 1925 on Heligoland, a small German archipelago in the North Sea. Doderer stresses the lasting impact World War II had on Krüss (as on himself). He interprets Krüss's optimism, his rampant imagination, and his gusto for spinning yarns and playing with puns as attempts at dealing with traumatic wartime experiences. According to Krüss, art and literature do not merely dampen the horrors; he also calls upon them to prevent them and to build a better world by way of reasoned imagination (cf. p. 111). It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Doderer views Krüss's work as truly utopian instead of dismissing it as innocuous or escapist play. Indeed, he considers this utopian moment as inherent to all of Krüss's texts. In the second part of the book, Doderer not only analyzes Krüss's poetry and novels, but also his poetics. He shows how Krüss's aesthetic creation is underpinned by philosophical, linguistic, and theoretical reflection. Finally, in the third part of the book, Doderer recollects his own friendship with James Krüss, which began on a train trip to Slovenia in 1965 and ended with Krüss's burial at sea in the fall of 1997. Thanks to the successful combination of biography and work analysis, as well as to Doderer's personal tone, Islander and Cosmopolitan is both an instructive and enticing read to be commended to every fan of Krüss's work.