One week before its first publication in Germany’s leading weekly newspaper, Die Zeit, in November 1962, Johannes Bobrowski recited Erfahrung at a literary meeting of the legendary Gruppe 47, an informal alliance of German postwar authors that included the novelists and Nobel Prize recipients Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass. He immediately won this group’s prestigious literary award.
While the short poem’s title suggests a concrete and tangible singular event, the dense text exposes the reader to a precarious montage of contrastive juxtapositions and conflicting mythological layers reminiscent of superimposed film cuts. Consisting of only three lines, the first stanza echoes the beginning of Friedrich Hölderlin’s fragment Mnemosyne, where the “one sign” that “we are” laments the absence of, as well as inescapable submission to, interpretive pain.
Composed in an anonymous passive voice, Bobrowski’s “sign(s)”—“cross and fish”—have been “written” on a “cave’s” wall. It remains open to interpretation whether the “cave” is a Christian catacomb, the locus of Plato’s famous myth of liberation, or a prehistoric site. Bobrowski’s opening simultaneously connotes Christian and Platonic materialities and refers to Georges Bataille’s and Carl Einstein’s juxtapositions of prehistoric cultures and high modernism.
Written in the present tense, the second stanza offers a geological and historical report on opposite movements, immersions, and emergences. In the dreamlike narrative of this stanza, nature and history are presented as inextricably interwoven. Emerging as an indirect object, a lyrical “I” is first made explicit in the third stanza. In danger of drying up, it is the river (der Strom) that addresses the anonymous poem’s “I” in the final, unpunctuated stanza.
The stream here symbolizes both geological matter and a psychological as well as poetological suggestion (the stream of consciousness), but its “voice” consists of “sand.” This fragmentary concluding apostrophe can, however, also be read as originating in the nameless “I” and addressing the river. Narrative membranes between subject and object become permeable in the arrest of mourning (“open yourself / I cannot get through / your dead / are adrift inside me”).
The trauma of the Shoah and of World War II—or, as Bobrowski’s colleague Peter Weiss wrote, “all the dead ones who inhabit us”—makes the writing process for German postwar writers both unbearable and indispensable. The text of Bobrowski’s Experience is not told by an active subject. The self only temporarily surfaces as a location, a reflexive object, or a possessive pronoun. Prepositions assume the role of protagonists in Bobrowski’s dreamscape.
Bobrowski’s poem presents the building up of terror and its pressing need to be translated into perceptive heterotopia. At once enabling and demanding a slow reading, Erfahrung asks to be granted transitory passage through opening horizons of readers in the 21st century. The best and most widely available translation in English, by Ruth and Matthew Mead, unfortunately suffers from several imprecise (even wrong) verb choices.
Bibliography
Bobrowski, Johannes. “Experience.” In From the Rivers, translated by Ruth and Matthew Mead. London: Anvil Press, 1975, 52. Reprinted in Johannes Bobrowski, Shadow Lands: Selected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1994, 154.