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Volker Braun was born in Dresden in 1939. Between school and
university - a period extended by the authorities to punish him for his
political outspokenness - he did various labouring jobs; then at the
University of Leipzig he read philosophy. He worked as dramatist and director at the Berliner Ensemble (with Brecht’s widow, Helene Weigel) and at the Deutsches Theater, also in Berlin. He is the author of numerous plays, and of volumes of fiction, poetry and essays; many of which, before 1989, got him into trouble. He has won many prizes, the latest, the prestigious Georg-Büchner-Preis, in 2000.

   Volker Braun is a humane, witty, brave and bitterly disappointed poet. He does what poets should do: he bears witness. He suffers the times,and tries to make sense of them for himself and for others. His work has turned on the Wende itself, on the colossal shift, upheaval and turningpoint of November 1989. Poems of rage, grief and determined hope before that moment are faced, after it, by others expressing an equal disappointment. So much hope, so much disappointment. Wanting what his mentor Brecht called ‘a life worthy of human beings’, he got first the betrayal of socialism then the sell-out to a triumphant capitalism. As for us, we cannot now pretend that his criticisms only apply to the other system and the other side.

   Like most writers, Volker Braun has his own touchstones in world
literature, and many of his poems set quotations from, for example,
Rimbaud, Hölderlin and Brecht, into his own context, where they work as ironic illuminations of a present plight. Thus in ‘The Turningpoint’ he includes the sardonic exchange which Büchner invented for an epigraph to his revolutionary comedy Leonce and Lena: the idealist Alfieri asking: ‘E la fama?’ and the realist Gozzi countering with ‘E la fame?’ In ‘Pliny sends greetings to Tacitus’, a poem addressed to fellow-dramatist and dissident Heiner Müller, Braun quotes from the letters of the Younger Pliny to Cornelius Tacitus and Maecilius Nepos, and so illuminates the man-made catastrophes of the twentieth century (and his own involvement in them) by an imagery taken from AD 79.

   There are more poems by Volker Braun in Modern Poetry in Translation, no. 18, ‘European Voices’. These translations of Volker Braun appear by kind permission of Suhrkamp Verlag.