12/4/25
Thu,
19:30

mit nur momentharmonika
On the 100th Birthday of Ernst Jandl

Talk
Reading
← / →

© Wikimedia

Please note that the event will be held in German.

The poet Ernst Jandl (born 1925 in Vienna, died 2000 in the same city) would have turned 100 this August. Together with his life partner Friederike Mayröcker, he was among those poets who gained wider recognition within the extended circle of the Wiener Gruppe. And yet, Jandl resisted being associated with any group—just as, in the early 1970s, with the publication of his poetry collection dingfest, he sought to break open and move beyond the constraints of konkrete poesie.

He was, in truth, a loner with only loose alliances and—after a career initially marked by numerous scandals—something of an exception: a popular poet who addressed everyone without a trace of elitist arrogance. A Volksdichter in the best sense, whose audiences (“meine liebliche gemeinde”) flocked to his readings.

He came equipped with his greatest hits, which he loved to perform—poems such as „schtzngrmm“, „wien, heldenplatz“, or the monovocal „ottos mops“, which even made it into German children’s television in an animated video produced for Die Sendung mit der Maus. (Now that’s true fame!) These poems stem from a creative period in the second half of the 1960s, when Jandl found his own voice. They appear in now-famous books like Laut und Luise or der künstliche baum. These are texts full of linguistic “errors” (“eile mit feile / durch den fald”) or broken English (“ich was not yet / in brasilien”) that achieve great effect with simple, even the simplest, means.

The path toward this unmistakable sound, however, was arduous. In childhood, Jandl was shaped early on by the death of his mother and by the reign of the fascists—whom he strongly opposed but who nonetheless conscripted him into military service as a young man. Pivotal during these years were his first encounters with expressionist poetry and with jazz, and later, during his time as a prisoner of war, his reading of international avant-garde writers. It would take more than a decade after this—following a rather conventional early phase—before he could artistically master and transform these powerful influences.

What, in retrospect, might be called Jandl’s late work began relatively early in his writing career—with his resignation from teaching (he had worked as a teacher since 1950) and the publication of die bearbeitung der mütze at the end of the 1970s. His tone grew noticeably darker: Jandl invented a “heruntergekommene Sprache,” an artificial broken German through which he explored the experience of being thrown back onto one’s own body under the sign of gradual decay. This darkness persisted into his later and latest poems, which rank among the finest written in the second half of the twentieth century.

On this evening, Monika Rinck, Theresia Prammer, Franz Josef Czernin, and Ulf Stolterfoht will discuss the significance of Jandl’s work—then and now.

In addition, the TOLEDO Program invites you to join in translation experiments: in an intervention titled Höhenunterschiede, Monika Rinck ventures down the unmarked path connecting Rilke’s lofty tone with Jandl’s poems in “heruntergekommener Sprache.” The results of a collective translation laboratory (Theresia Prammer, Ali Abdollahi, Shane Anderson) will be presented, exploring the international resonance of Ernst Jandl’s poetry.

After the event, guests are invited to enjoy a glass of wine.

A joint event organized by the Haus für Poesie, the TOLEDO Program of the German Translators’ Fund, and the Austrian Cultural Forum Berlin.

Readings & discussion with:
Ali Abdollahi, Shane Anderson, Franz Josef Czernin, Theresia Prammer, Monika Rinck, Ulf Stolterfoht
Moderation: Thomas Eder