H. C. Artmann & Berlin ed. by Sonja Kaar and Marc-Oliver Schuster (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: H. C. Artmann & Berlin ed. by Sonja Kaar and Marc-Oliver Schuster Paul Buchholz Sonja Kaar and Marc-Oliver Schuster, eds., H. C. Artmann & Berlin. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2021. 294 pp. Academic literary-critical discourse on H. C. Artmann has tended to be sporadic and eclectic, and one reason for this is that his writings rarely if ever lend themselves to hermeneutic readings. Artmann's works are ludic, as the author himself pointed out, in a way that stringently adheres to Johan Huizinga's idea of play as a free act with no social function and no meaning outside itself. For this reason, the most fruitful scholarly work on H. C. Artmann is not based in hermeneutic close readings but rather seeks to capture the social and cultural world in which he wrote, performed, collaborated, and socialized. Sonja Kaar and Marc-Oliver Schuster's edited [End Page 119] volume H. C. Artmann & Berlin is, in this regard, an essential scholarly publication, valuable both to literary historians of the postwar era and to general Artmann enthusiasts. The book collects the proceedings of a 2019 conference of the same name, held in the Wien-Bibliothek in the Vienna Rathaus. Its title is, at any rate, a bit reductive: while the book indeed gives diverse accounts of the author's stays in Berlin in 1962, 1965–66, and 1967–68, it also delves into an array of other fascinating topics. Indeed, this book seems somewhat like a prelude to the Artmann biography being published in 2023, co-written by Schuster with Veronika Premer. H. C. Artmann und Berlin shows how the author's enthusiastic and sociable relationship to Berlin yielded some of the most iconic works of his career, including his story "dracula dracula" and its iterations across media (performative happening, printed text, and woodcut print). While in Berlin, Artmann became a social node for younger Austrian writers for whom he was an iconoclastic role model and interlocutor, such as Peter Chotjewitz and Wolfgang Bauer. Finally, the book provides a clearer sense of how Artmann—who scrupulously avoided political commentary in his works, taking a very different postwar path than the Gruppe 47—in his own way was deeply embedded in the political-cultural landscape of the 1960s: his dislike of the militant leftist language that flooded the cultural scene of West Berlin in the later sixties, his (apocryphal) claim to having been present at the 1967 West Berlin student demonstration against the Shah of Iran, his cordial encounters with RAF terrorist Gudrun Ensslin, and time spent socializing with Peter Weiss. These stories, presented in biographical, historical, and analytic chapters as well as interviews, are by no means only raw anecdotes; they have the cumulative purpose of showing how Artmann's highly eccentric path was taken deliberately and in lively dialogue with his literary contemporaries. The book is divided into four sections, each of which is in itself eclectic in terms of genre. Marc-Oliver Schuster opens the first, "Überblick und Annäherungen," with a biographical overview detailing Artmann's times in (West) Berlin—that is to say, he never lived there for any very extended period of time, but he made frequent extensive visits to the city, which prior to the upheavals in 1968 had a special status for the author as a city of creative possibility and cultural liberality. Marc-Oliver Schuster provides an extensive overview of Artmann's nearly lifelong relationship to the city of Berlin, and [End Page 120] Peter Pabisch presents the history of the institution that was an important node of Artmann's literary presence in the city, the Literary Colloquium of Berlin (LCB). Hermann Schlösser's research on the reception of Artmann in the feuilletons of the BRD in the 1960s is particularly helpful in understanding how Artmann was seen (and even exoticized) within the literary culture of West Germany. Other highlights of this section include a 2019 interview with Gerhard Rühm as well as a somewhat meandering yet ultimately illuminating conversation between Friederike Mayröcker, Rosa Pock, Uwe Bremer, and Oswald Wiener. The second section of the book, "Spezielle Zugänge," focuses on Artmann's relationships and parallels to...