Phantasmatisches Erinnern als Dimension lyrischer Memoria

Abstract

What follows is a close reading of Günter Eich’s late poem Augsburg (1971). Emphasizing a specifically aesthetic interpretation, it focuses on the poem’s lyrical staging of phantasmatic memory and its self-unfolding as an extraordinarily dense, allusion-laden, and profoundly skeptical meditation on unredeemable, albeit long-past, suffering. By doing so, the article makes a case for understanding literary understanding as both essentially knowledge-dependent and experiential.