Hanser: Michael Krüger: How do stars get to the sky?

The poet looks at his childhood and points to what would shape his entire existence: “The more I read, the more complicated my life became.” This is a truth that is as profitable as it is dangerous: literature does not strengthen, literature makes you porous; Poetry does not harden, poetry softens, even confuses people. The sensitive is the vulnerable. Poetry is disruption – against the ideologically boring chatter about how and where. Childhood, youth, wonderful aging. A lot of experience and a lot of knowledge are accumulated for the most valuable of all experiences: life becomes more beautiful the more we manage to come to terms with the incomprehensibility of things.

This Saturday Michael Krüger will be 80 years old. The volume “Appointment with Poets” was published to mark the anniversary. Memories and Encounters«. It’s an unadorned title. Stands for objectivity. Modesty, of course, is highly exclusive and elitist: it is the ability to concentrate on what shopping, nonsense comedy, party books, talk shows, the Internet and events still leave. In the midst of a reality that more and more resembles a brightly radiated, but by no means illuminated theater.

This book speaks of a memory without pretense. “For me, everything is uncertain, a lot of things are blurred,” writes Krüger. For him, existence is not a “narrative process…” As a boy, he owned a chemistry set. His brother directed his alchemical desires in a different direction, saying that “the true gold of a country is its philosophy and its literature.” Krüger, one of the great German publishers and an important poet, became a treasure digger and gold finder in a special way.

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His memories tell of childhood and youth in the West Berlin area around Wannsee, Schlachtensee and Nikolassee. But then you quickly move on to friends, acquaintances, role models and companions from the European literary cosmos. Krüger lets us take part in his way of life in a mosaic of episodes, award speeches and notes from the road. He remains pleasantly shy of the center. Intrigues, scandals? “Not for me.” We read portraits of the writer Reinhard Lettau and the publisher Klaus Wagenbach, sketches of Israeli, Polish, Swedish, and especially Italian authors (Moravia, Magris, Eco).

Essentially, it tells of the miracles that arise from surprises: one step aside and our carefully structured existence loses its supports; a moment’s slowdown and we may be in a different time; one look from the path and we disappear from our orderly course of life. Every freedom we take takes away something we otherwise like to hold on to: security. Because every step towards freedom is a step into strangeness. This remains associated with fear, and anyone who doesn’t feel it is not free. But: “If you no longer care about the outcome, you’ve reached your destination.”

The memories are emotionally close to Krüger’s poems. Sleep is gossamer in this poetry; She envies the snow’s silence, the wind blows into the verses, it exposes the undersides of the leaves, and when it is hottest, at night, “a boat would have to leave / in the mouse-gray sky, far away from all human warmth.” In these volumes of poetry (such as “Diderot’s Cat”, “At Night, Under the Trees”, “Forecast”, “Ins Reine”, “Simple”) we learn how the second and the century, the face and the mask, the beautiful and that coarse-grained residue of which our main part of life consists, mix in mysterious ways. There is an idea from the long-time Hanser author Botho Strauss that also applies to Krüger’s poems: Language is, so to speak, only the contrast medium that flows through the inexpressible “to represent the veins of muteness.”

Michael Krüger, born in Wittgendorf (near Zeitz) in 1943, has settled existentially between the two states. He was the head of a publishing house and has also been an author for a long time. Is a reader and a writer. Was an employee and remained a free spirit. The trained bookseller and studied philosopher joined the Munich-based Carl Hanser publishing house in the momentous year of 1968, which gave its name to a generation, and became literary director and managing partner. Over the years, Krüger became a legend. He worked tirelessly, with precise division of time and workload, and was very skilful in balancing the hardships of duty with the joys of art. In a conversation appended to the volume, interviewer Knut Cordsen recalls Karl Heinz Bohrer, who described the “gentle anarchist” Krüger as having an “almost angelic aura.”

The years of apprenticeship in which he began, as a youth, to “train himself as a fatalist and existentialist” turned into publishing bourgeois mastery. In memory of his close friend Klaus Wagenbach, it is said about the early years that one saw “a few avant-gardes twitch and flutter and in their wake the emergence of the old forms.” A victory of fine sense and fine style. Maybe the true culture lies in finding the way to melancholy after ’68 instead of enduring in a mossy old rebel pose. And so this ironic person, in the spirit of a pain-filled romantic, stands for a culture against informational excesses and waving increases in stimulation. This passionate man always countered this with what he himself called “a defense of poetry that went to the limit of ridiculousness.”

Voted “Publisher of the Year” several times by the bookseller industry, Hanser had a proud list of poets under Krüger’s aegis: Elias Canetti, Joseph Brodsky, Umberto Eco, W. G. Sebald, Jostein Gaarder, Seamus Heaney, Jorge Luis Borges, Günter Kunert, Milan Kundera, Alexander Tisma, Botho Strauss, Philip Roth. Herta Müller and Tomas Tranströmer were also among the Nobel Prize winners with Hanser contracts. For Krüger, the art of publishing meant: characterful, tenacious outwitting of the trend of the times that pushes for the concentration of market power; Krüger said: “Our little garden must never be dominated by a tree in whose shade nothing else grows.”

Krüger’s novels and novellas (“What to Do?”, “Why Beijing?”, “Why Me?”, “The Cello Player,” “The Wrong House”) are a confident, vibrant play with the conflicts between desire and ability, dreams and reality. In the end, as one poem says, “the only thing that counts is / the impenetrable world.” It’s like grabbing a kind of serenity velvet. Krüger’s tone does not allow the performance time to cut the budget of the dream time. In the middle of industrial landscapes, there is that exotic remoteness in his poetry that winks at us from the village stories of his grandparents.

The poet describes himself as a pessimist, but he still insists that people are resilient even when careless. Everything experienced is melted back into longing in his work. Uncertainty and certainty touch each other with their very open ends. This poet is extremely unfashionable in his efficiency: he calculates – with people. With the person who is slow. But he knows how the stars come to the sky and why they don’t fall down. And who needs art and literature because both are “the only system that never wants to speak for everyone.”

Michael Krüger: Appointments with poets. Memories and encounters. Suhrkamp. 447 p., hardcover, €30.

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