Georg Trakl, Sarah Kirsch & Co. Eigencodierung vs. Konventionelles Diskursverstehen

The themes and forms of poetry – perhaps the most sensitive genre in the entire literary world – hardly play a role anymore in German studies. There are (good) reasons for this; yet it is precisely the reservoirs of meaning in poems, which often open up extremely broad scope for their readers, that are well suited to promoting a critical examination of (learned, practiced, drilled) everyday language and ensuring a distance from it, as Karl Kraus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Philip Roth, for example, demanded in their day. The central task of art, writes the Austrian poet Christoph W. Aigner, has always been to produce “objects of great charm and magic”; and such things, which may have survived for thousands of years, “all kinds of powers with their ideological or moral claims to sole representation,” he adds, “still move us.” In his view, art is therefore ill-advised, and in this he agrees with Jan Skácel and Sarah Kirsch, for example, if it is content to blend into the noise of everyday life. After all, it can also lead the reader to turn back to their own existence. At least, as long as teaching does not interfere with or completely block the understanding of the texts, as cultural journalism often does, preferring to snoop into the private lives of authors rather than follow the ambiguous traces in their texts.