Since hearing Lutz Seiler read at Sheffield’s Off the Shelf Festival last year, I’ve been keen to learn more about his home state of Thüringen in the former GDR, and in particular the uranium mines that dominated the landscape and lives of so many people there. The essay collection In Case of Loss is illuminating on this, as well as on Lutz Seiler’s own family and upbringing: he looks back at his past, on memory, change and transformation. But across the individual pieces it’s also an account of his development as a poet. He discusses the work of German poets Peter Huchel and Jürgen Becker, and their influence on his writing, as well as describing, often with humour, the long and arduous journey of the poem onto the page. And the essays work like poetry: there’s an elegance of language and expression, an intensity of focus, and often a beautiful structural arc within the essay which work together in this wonderful translation by Martyn Crucefix.
In Under the Pine Vault we see Lutz Seiler settling into his new home on Hubertusweg in Wilhelmshorst outside Berlin. It’s the former home of the poet Peter Huchel, and as he walks around the house and garden, he’s aware not only of Huchel’s presence, but of other former residents too, like the Red Army officers, who used the house as their HQ in 1945. There are wonderful lyrical descriptions of the pine trees bordering the garden, but so close to the house, they stretch above it, they dominate it. The sense of time passing is echoed in the house and garden through the seasons: in summer…the quality of light in the branches shifts endlessly. Light falls through budding leaves in a palimpsest that towers over us and around us, slowly shifting with the sun in the course of the day. There’s an awareness of sound: the clanking of freight wagons from the nearby railway lines, the beating of pigeons’ wings, and again, those pines, the rain stirs a growing murmur in the vaulting pines, a sound that envelops us, while, up above, the breeze passes. And he tells us of his own creative process: standing, looking at the house from the edge of the forest, staring at the bark of a tree, what is familiar enables me to absent myself. It is then things begin to come to mind.
There’s a lovely movement in the essays between this account of his creative process and his personal lived experience. In Aurora he says a poem can take seven years to develop from the glimpse of an idea to full maturity. We see this play out in In the Anchor Jar when, frustrated that a poem isn’t working, Lutz Seiler remembers the jars his family used for preserves in the cellar, ribbed glass jars made by the Anchor company in Saxony, used each year to preserve and store the deluge of fruit from the garden. In the knowledge that preserving changes the taste of the original fruit, he cuts up his draft text, stuffs the pieces in the jars and leaves them for seven years. When he finally takes them out he realises the words had not been forgotten, that they’d all been used over the years in other poems. I had preserved; I had set aside, yet nothing had been lost to the writing…the words had taken their time till their text had emerged.
The sense of time passing is present in The Tired Territory, where village life in Thüringen is described. These were known as the ‘tired villages’, due to the constant lethargy and heaviness experienced by the residents. Many of them worked in the uranium mines, developed by the Soviets after the Second World War, and were exposed to radioactive material. Most of them died before the age of 65, including Lutz Seiler’s grandfather, Gerhard Seiler. There’s a chilling account of this grandfather coming home after work and wafting his hand above the radio. Instantly the music faded into an otherworldly crackling and hissing. When he took his hand away from the box, the haunting subsided. His childhood landscape of spoil heaps and tailing ponds has now disappeared, leaving only a show mine, a kind of tourist experience. The road layout has changed too. He remembers picnicking beside the road as a child, his father identifying the passing cars. Returning many years later, he sees his father’s fascination for cars as an expression of his longing for a different life in the West.
I enjoyed meeting those parents again, the parents I’d met not long ago in the novel Stern 111—we see that old radio again, incidentally, brought along on the picnic. His father features in the essay Sundays I Thought of God, one of my favourites, not least because of the beautiful shape of the piece. It starts with the eponymous poem in which he describes the electricity substation where, as a child, he thought God resided. He then relates the Sunday morning ritual in their family, when he and his father would walk past the church, with its summoning bells, down to the garages where their beloved Zhiguli car was kept. They would spend the morning servicing the car in meticulous and routine fashion. By the age of seventeen or eighteen Lutz Seiler had lost interest in their alternative ritual. He’d turned to motorbikes and was more interested in riding than maintaining. But at the end of the essay, when he witnesses a ghastly accident involving electrocution, we’re taken back to that substation, back to that Sunday ritual: in his horror and powerlessness for the first time since childhood.. he… seriously thinks about praying.
There’s humour in these essays too. I laughed while reading Huchel and the Dummy Bridge at the image of Lutz Seiler reading poetry, confined to the cabin of the truck he’s driving on National Service, while the other young conscripts build a dummy bridge—even more when the bridge collapses within ten seconds under pressure from the current. And at the description of Professor Winter, in The Invocation, with his habit of lifting his long unibrow above the bridge of his nose in such a way that it resembled a little tent pitched on his forehead. That essay continues with Prof Winter wandering out onto the balcony while Lutz Seiler, the exam candidate, desperately and comically continues his learned regurgitation on Beauty, the content now disappearing, leaving just the reverberation of sound. Reminding him of the time he stood at the cornerstone as a small boy calling and calling for his playmates Kerstin and Andrea, the sound swelling, powerful and overwhelming, like a Mohican chieftain who had lost his people, he discovered a distinct pleasure in the invocation itself.
So this collection did indeed tell me more about Thüringen and those uranium mines, but those pieces are really part of a broader endeavour: exploring the influences and experiences that contributed to the poetics of Lutz Seiler. It does this brilliantly. Thanks to Martyn Crucefix and And Other Stories for bringing this to us. Thanks to Sheffield’s Off the Shelf Festival for that great evening with Lutz Seiler.
peakreads 