Poetically written and originally given as lectures, this is a moving essay collection from Durs Grünbein. In his four Lord Weidenfeld Lectures held in Oxford in 2019, German poet Durs Grünbein dealt with a topic that has occupied his mind ever since he began to perceive his own position within the past of his nation, his linguistic community, and his family: How is it possible that history can determine the individual poetic imagination and segregate it into private niches? Shouldn-t poetry look at the world with its own sovereign eyes instead? -In the form of a collage or -photosynthesis,- in image and text, Grünbein lets the fundamental opposition between poetic license and almost overwhelming bondage to history appear in an exemplary way. From the seeming trifle of a stamp with the portrait of Adolf Hitler, he moves through the phenomenon of the -Führer-s streets- and into the inferno of aerial warfare. In the end, Grünbein argues that we are faced with the powerlessness of writing
