The poet Franz Mon died at the age of 95 in Frankfurt am Main, where he was also born on May 6, 1926. At the age of seventeen, Mon was drafted as an anti-aircraft helper. He survived the Second World War, studied German, history and philosophy and became a pioneer of experimental and concrete poetry with his poems, which appeared in the 1950s.
In order to be able to leave the experience of dictatorship and totalitarianism behind, the artists of this literary trend dissolved language into its component parts: sound, text and typeface are each recognizable in their own medial role for the poetry. Franz Mon renewed sound poetry and created visual poems. He worked on new collages in Frankfurt until his death.
“We have language and it has us”, Franz Mon once wrote and penetrated the conditions of this dependency, the limits of communication, not only in his poems but also in radio plays and essays. In the last decades of his life things became quieter around Franz Mon. Thanks to the commitment of the poet Michael Lentz, however, his works continued to be edited. Most recently, “Language for Life. Collected Essays” was published in 2016 by S. Fischer Verlag.
The fact that there was again a literary avant-garde in Germany after the epochal break of the Nazi era was largely due to Franz Mon.