50th anniversary of death – Rolf Dieter Brinkmann: The eyes open

With you / in another blue / we share a dream, »Jochen Distelmeyer sang in the Blumbeld song” Thousands of tears deep “and thus made the sustainable pop cultural effect of the Cologne author Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, who died in 1975. He wrote in 1975 in his last volume of poem “Westward 1 & 2”: “Who said that something like that / is / is? I go to one / other blue ». The “other blue” at Brinkmann, which Distelmeyer quotes here, is a space beyond the confines of everyday life, beyond constraints and expectations, an interface between private and social utopias. Like the flower field singer, Brinkmann has claimed for his literature to refer to larger social relationships in the description of the private.

“The storytellers continue, the auto industry continues, the workers continue, the governments continue, the Rock’n’roll singers continue,” Brinkmann wrote in “westward 1 & 2” in the preliminary remark, “The moon opens, the sun opens, the eyes open, the doors open, the mouth is going, you speak, you make a sign”. When the book was released in May 1975, Brinkmann, born in 1940, was no longer alive, and on April 23, 1975, a car had hit him during a reading trip in London. The continued continued without the poet, who had just spoke up again after a break of several years.

“The money continues, and the collapse, as the songs continue,” continues in “westward 1 & 2”, which on the occasion of its 50th anniversary of death, complemented by poems from the estate. «Unfortunately I can’t play the guitar, I can only write typewriter, only stuttering, with two fingers. Perhaps sometimes I succeeded in making the poems easy enough, such as songs, like a door, out of language and the stipulations. » In this foreword, everything that Brinkmann wanted to do in his short career as a freelance writer in poems, essays, material collections and a novel wanted to implement programmatically: out of the stipulations, from the language, the genre divisions, the gender roles, at the same time the ditch should be leveled between high and pop culture.

«Rolf Dieter Brinkmann always wants to prove his passion against what has come. He doesn’t want to drive at all. In the struggle for the realization of his passion, his work (and immediately kicks the chair behind him), which rebellions against every seat in the cozy or even ordinary, », Elfriede Jelinek once wrote about the author, who has also torn down the boundary between art and life in his literature: photos of his apartment and his living environment can be found next to his poems, essays between autobiography and literary and literary reflection his work. This living environment and this life can be explored in the Brinkmann biography of Michael Töteberg and Alexandra Vasa, which was also published on the occasion of the 50th day of death, which in the title-although it is less on the literary work as the biographical stations-in turn to continue and refers to private and social utopia: “I go to another blue”.

“You can do so much better than, for example, bossing around on a poem for a long time – walking around in the city, reading the newspaper, going to the cinema, fucking, drilling, listening in the nose, hearing records, talking stupidly with people …” Brinkmann wrote in his poem “Vanilla”. This programmatic statement summarizes the central theme of his work that appears in the blue: the relationship between life and writing. His search for a new form of literature outside of specified meaning patterns, according to a literature of the immediate presence, relied on a manner of language that reacted to the sensual experience to be made every day.

In his early poems, Brinkmann was about capturing everyday experience as a snapshot. «You just need to be unscrupulous to write it down as a poem. If it doesn’t work this time, you throw the note away, next time you pack it, something else, »he noted once. Frank Schäfer also emphasizes the “enormously artistic snapshots from everyday life” in his “slip box” to Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, written on the 50th anniversary of the death, “profane epiphanies, which will significantly shape the lyrical style of the seventies”. Brinkmann wanted to undermine the outstanding position of the artist in society and, through the conscious inclusion of everyday observations and trivial literature – pornography, Western and science fiction, as the Leslie A. Fiedler highly estimated by Brinkmann, in his essay “Cross the Border – Close the GAP” – prevented his captivation through the cultural business.

«Well -known literary imagination blur: the space expands, changed dimensions of consciousness. The feedback system of the words, which is effective in the usual grammatical orders, no longer corresponds to sensual experience every day, ”said Brinkmann as early as 1969 in his essay“ The film in words ”. The new sensual experiences through advertising, television, music and other media required a new form of literature, according to Brinkmann, an expansion of the existing forms and leaving the idea of ​​the “usual addition of words”, instead it is about “projecting ideas”.

Nevertheless, Brinkmann did “no uncritical pop-affirmation”, emphasizes Schäfer, who created his book less as a stringent biography, but as a mixed form of thoughts, photo essay and literary approach in the spirit of Brinkmann. Brinkmann understood POP as a combination of radical social criticism and formal affirmation, as a new coding and exceeding existing limits. As Schäfer emphasizes, this was not understood by contemporary criticism, “by the way, especially from the left”. Around 1970 Martin Walser shone in the “Course Book” against the “Schick contemporary artist nonsense” by authors such as Brinkmann or Handke with whom no policy was to be done.

“Underground initially means general behavior – personal behavior that has settled from the behavior of the older generation, which can constantly represent itself, can represent an establishment an establishment,” Brinkmann once formulated in an interview in the direction of Walser and Co. “And you have set off and go your own way.” Because, regardless of the hated cultural business, Brinkmann saw the opportunity to break out of incurred structures and also the bias to think in national rooms. So the way to the west, to the USA, which is described in the poem “westward”, was also a moment of liberation: “Suddenly, at this point, I was at this point in my life … I looked at the airfield and suddenly had the feeling that I had no past anymore.”

Rolf Dieter Brinkmann: westward 1 & 2nd poems. Rowohlt 2025, 448 pages, born, 52 €.
Frank Schäfer: Rolf Dieter Brinkmann. A note box. Verlag Andreas Reiffer 2025, 160 pages, born, 18 €.
Michael Töteberg/Alexandra Vasa: I go to another blue. Rolf Dieter Brinkmann – a biography. Rowohlt 2025, 400 S., born, € 35.