Words without Borders: The Multicultural Dialogue of Manfred Winkler’s Poetry

Born in the former Austro-Hungarian province of Bukowina, German-language writer, translator, painter, and sculptor Manfred Winkler (1922–2014) spent much of his lifetime and his long career crossing geographical, national, ideological, and linguistic borders. Perhaps best known as Paul Celan’s most important translator into Hebrew, he remains one of Israel’s most challenging contemporary poets due to his intercultural writing involving German. This article reflects and explores the incredible variety of Manfred Winkler’s border crossings and positions his writing in its various cultural contexts. It outlines the central themes and tendencies in the work of a writer who represents the darkness of war by orchestrating the memory of the Shoah and the events of the Jewish-Arab conflict with a sense of grief rather than from a position of judgment and in so doing delineates the fault lines and turning points of much of the twentieth century.